The Drinker (22 page)

49

Of my third cell-mate, Holz by name, I have little enough to report. He was a strong young man of about thirty—looking younger than his years, and one might have thought the little fair moustache under his nose coquettish, had it not been that his immeasurably sad face forbade any thought of coquetry. He had only been some six months in the institution, but he had come straight from a convict prison, where he had spent six years.

As Qual was either silent or else talked nonsense, and as Herbst could only talk about himself, his friend, or his hated fellow-prisoners, Holz was the one I chatted with for the two hours between half-past seven and half-past nine when we usually kept ourselves awake in order not to wake up too early in the morning. Mostly it was I who talked, often of my former life, for it was essential to me to impress on one man, at least, the fact that in my own circle, I had once been an important and respected man. Or I told him of the worries and anxieties which now obsessed me, and it would have been better if I had paid more attention to Holz’s simple advice: “You want to crawl to your wife, Sommer,” he often warned me. “Don’t rely on your brains and some legal tricks, the others are better than you at that. I know how they can play about with simple people—and you’re only a simple fellow too, Sommer. The doctor will always get you tied up—and then it’ll be the Public Prosecutor’s turn! Agree to any conditions your wife makes, give up your property even, what’s the odds, only see that you get out of this hole! You don’t know yet what it’s like to be shut away for a long period. Write to her, Sommer, write to her immediately, tomorrow afternoon!”

So said Holz in his quiet even and toneless voice. Occasionally he would talk of himself. But never of his past life at liberty, of this I only found out that he was born and brought up in Hamburg. What his parents were, what he had learnt, what crimes (and they must have been serious crimes!) had earned him such a long gaol sentence, I do not know. I believe a warder once told me that Holz had formerly been a celebrated burglar. I can hardly believe it. He was so quiet, so simple, without any initiative or protest, I simply cannot credit him with sufficient energy for this dangerous calling, requiring as it does considerable presence of mind and an ability for making quick decisions. But of course it is always possible that his long stay in prison had completely changed him.

“I was six years in gaol without once being punished,” he told me on one occasion.

Simply as he said it, the words had a ring of pride. He liked best to talk of his time in prison. He told me about his work, he recounted in full detail how he had begun by weaving material for mattresses, and had progressed to shirt-material. Then he had been put on to knitting stockings on the “flat machine”—I could hardly imagine what a flat machine was, even after I discovered that there was also a “round machine” for knitting stockings.

Then came Holz’s best time in gaol; he became a washer-up in the kitchen. Here he had as much to eat as he wanted, was in the company of his comrades, and even got to see women at least once a day. These women came from the nearby women’s prison to fetch food. Despite all precautions, glances and notes were exchanged and they even managed to pass bread, sausage and margarine to the women. Holz assured me that he only did what all his companions among the kitchen-staff did, but when the affair came to light they put the entire blame on him, and he was taken out of the kitchen. Only his good conduct saved him from the punishment cells. A horrible year ensued: Holz had to pick oakum in a solitary cell—and at the mention of this task how very clearly I recalled Magda’s arrangement with the prison administration, and my journey to Hamburg. Eventually Holz, being considered not liable to escape, was put on to outside work, and the prison cell only saw him at bed-time, he worked outside the whole day through, in the open fields, or in the sawmill in winter-time, Holz liked to talk of all these simple things. He still knew every task that had been allotted to him; strands which had given him trouble in picking he could still describe with the same fresh anger he must have felt in his solitary cell.

But Holz’s speciality was his disquisitions on food. Since everybody was always hungry, they constantly talked about food, probably it was all they thought of. Talking of food was a kind of mania, it only made the pangs of our hunger worse, but we could never leave off. In this Holz was an absolute master. Not that he thought up any refined meals to make our mouths water, no, his descriptions were of a biblical plainness. The meals he described were simply the same as those a common labourer eats, they were the meals he got in the convict prison. His head, never used for deep thinking, was sufficiently clear for him to tell me of any slight change in the usually constant prison menu; he still knew the ups and downs of the bread ration; the number of potatoes a prisoner under punishment is entitled to at midday instead of bread, and the extra allocation of bread, sausage and cheese for overtime and land-workers. He still knew all the Christmas extras, and he was most eloquent when he described how a farmer, pleased at a good piece of mowing, had given the convict-party pieces of bread spread thick with “good butter” or dripping, and five cigarettes per man as well. Each experience of this kind had engraved itself deep in his memory, and even today his voice trembled as he described how his stomach had not been able to stand the unwonted rich food, and he had brought it all up again. Holz’s accounts of food were as simple as that, yet I always liked to hear them over and over again, they were so moving! But each time, it struck us that a convict got about twice as much to eat as an institution inmate.

“There, you can see,” Holz would say, “how they rob us! But what can you do? A donkey is there to carry turnips and get beaten, and we’re worse off than a donkey, because he is worth a few marks whereas with us, they’re glad when we’re dead.”

Holz would say such things without any reproach, without bitterness even. For him, they were the matter-of-fact evidences of the unalterable way of the world.

In the asylum, Holz enjoyed a good reputation, both among the keepers and the prisoners. Here too he had immediately been put on to outside work without any probationary period, he worked in a gravel pit, for a building contractor. There he came into contact with many “civilians,” and had all kinds of things given him. He always had a couple of matches to spare for a friend, or a little onion, and he was the much-envied possessor of a glass containing salt, and of nutmeg and pepper. With these, he beautified his water-soup. From an old sardine tin which he found, he made a grater by punching holes in the bottom with a nail, and with this he would grate parsley-roots, celery-roots, carrots, raw potatoes even, if his hunger was very keen. With all these trifles, which a man “outside” would take entirely for granted, he garnished his plain life, and brought a little joy into it, and always had something to look forward to. He never joined in any game, either because he could not play or did not want to. He never read a newspaper, and only listened to the lightest dance-music on the radio.

“That cheers me up!” he would say then. A little light would come into his eyes, and he would smile, a rare and touching smile. All in all, a modest courageous man—I am glad that I never seriously tried to find out about his crime, I do not want to blacken this picture.

50

These were the three companions with whom I shared the cell that first night, to whose heavy breathing I listened, while shame, remorse and anger shook my heart. Outside the window stood the night, sometimes I raised my head and saw a few stars twinkling; I read a poem about them once, how they have been looking down for thousands of years, with the same cool glitter, on human joy and human sorrow. At the time, it had not touched me, but now it did, and I wondered whether the stars had ever witnessed such a desperate, so foolishly-occasioned sorrow as that which had overtaken me. It seemed almost impossible. And as the night-hours slowly dragged on, one after the other, from chime to chime, towards the new morning, I thought more leniently of Magda and the cunning doctor, and I swore to myself once again that next time I would be shrewder and more truthful. I convinced myself that nothing was lost yet, and I imagined long conversations with the doctor, in which I displayed a rare wit and a charming candour.

Eventually—an hour or so before unlocking-time—I really fell asleep. In my dream I was in my home town, I went through its streets and alleys, I saw many friends and acquaintances but they did not see me and passed by me without a greeting. Eventually I saw Magda sitting on that bench that is associated with our earliest schoolday friendship. I went towards her and sat down beside her. But she did not notice me. I wanted to touch her dress, I reached out my hand, but I could not grasp her dress. I tried to speak to her, and I did speak too, but my voice made no sound, I could not hear it, and Magda could not hear it either. Then I realised with a sharp terror that I was only a shadow wandering among the living, that I was dead. I was so terrified that I awoke—the head-nurse’s key was rattling in the lock and his voice cried “Get up!”

Yes, a new morning was beginning and now I was no longer a guest in the death-house, instead I was enrolled in the ranks with the others, like all of them I whiled my gloomy hours away here. They made no more fuss of me, they spoke to me, and then they began to quarrel with me, in the washroom they shoved me away from the basins, and sneered at me when I tried to keep my fingernails clean with a sharpened stick.

Look at him! What’s he doing that for? He’s as deep in the mud as we are!” And I made my little deals like them. I saved a slice of bread from my roaring hunger and traded it for a few crumbs of tobacco, and the first time I was cheated, there was very little tobacco, and a great deal of dried roseleaves mixed in it. Once, too—I will confess—I stole from our orderly Herbst two slices of bread thickly spread with butter, which he had hidden under his bolster. But I was so excited, that I neither enjoyed them, nor did they agree with me. That is the only thing I ever directly stole. I am a weak man, I know that now, but I am no thief. My fear is always greater than my appetite, and in that I am weak too.

And on this first day, when the order to “Fall in” sounded, I lined up with the others, enrolled among them, I had no advantage now over any of them. A keeper came and took me to a single cell in which there was no bed, only a table, a stool, and a number of different working materials, at which I stared with anxious and wondering eyes, convinced that such a clumsy man as I would never in my life be able to learn such strange work. I saw the ready-cut brush- and broom-holders, and hair bristles, the rice-straw and millet and fibre for the various kinds of brushes and brooms, which I was to learn to make. I saw rolls of thick and thin wire, and a knife—no, I would never learn it! Nobody came, I was shut in my cell—now that I had so urgently begged the doctor to deliver me from Lexer, was I to make brushes without my instructor? I tried it, I seized a few bristles and tried to fasten them in the holes which were already bored. But they were too few, and they fell out again. The next time I took more, but now it was too many and when I tried to force them into the holes, some broke and the others fell to the floor. I bent down and quickly tried to tidy up the mess, the key rattled again, and in sprang little Lexer with his discoloured fangs, and seized me by the breast and cried shrilly: “What did you do with that razor-blade? You’re not going to shit on me, Sommer!”

I tore myself away furiously and cried: “Keep your hands off me, I tell you! What have your lying tales got to do with me?”

The little scoundrel looked at me for a moment, astonished and silenced, then he laughed again in an ugly way and said: “All right, just as you like. But one day, I’m going to shit on you!” (However he has mostly let me alone since then, as I have said.) And suddenly changing, he asked: “Haven’t you got a chew of tobacco for me, Sommer, just a little one?”

I had none, and I told him so, and he said angrily: “There is nothing to be done with you. What did they want to shove a fellow like you in here for? Hang the wire up on the stand. No, not the thick wire, you ox, you’re supposed to make hand-brushes first, out of good bristle, they’re the easiest. Take the fine wire. Two hundred holes a day is your task for the first week, the work inspector will tell you, and if you don’t do it they put you in the cooler with the hard bed and make you get a move on! I can do a thousand holes a day, two thousand when I want to, but I don’t. Why should I? So the fat boys can make more out of us? We’d still have to go hungry! Look, first you pull the wire through the hole like this, so it makes a loop, and then you stick the bristles in, just as many as you can pick up with two fingers, that’s just right. And now you pull the loop tight, and there’s your bristles already fixed! That’s the whole knack, a kid could learn it in five minutes, and now you do it and show you can do as much as a kid!”

And while Lexer had been breathlessly declaiming all this in his shrill voice so that the spittle stood on his lips, I had been watching with astonishment how his dirty fingers with their bitten nails had drawn the fine wire through the hole with incredible dexterity, had seized just enough bristles to fit exactly into the hole without any space between, and finally had gently and quickly pulled the loop tight. As he did it, it really seemed childishly simple to me too. But what happened when I tried this simple thing myself? My wire would not go into the hole, it buckled instead of making a loop, and I picked up too few or too many bristles, and scattered them on the floor. Meantime Lexer was abusing me ceaselessly and he pushed me and nudged me and splashed me with his spittle, till I threw the brush down and cried again furiously: “Leave me alone, I tell you!”

So we worked the whole morning, I absolutely desperate over my clumsiness, and convinced I would never learn, and he all the time getting shriller, more triumphant, more overbearing. At the end of the morning we had finished only one single brush, of eighty holes, and it did not look right, as even I could see.

“Stick this on the rubbish-heap yourself, Sommer!” yelled Lexer. “Pull the plug on it before the work inspector gets to see it, or he’ll put you under punishment for wasting material! I’m not coming back into this stinking hole this afternoon. You know now how it’s supposed to be done, and if you don’t do it, that’s your look-out, you’ll have to answer for it. I’m not going to have anything to do with it!”

So after five hours I was free of my disgusting instructor and I could have saved myself that sudden outburst of antipathy that had been so ill-received by the doctor. But I was absolutely in despair over my brush-making that afternoon, and by evening I had not finished more than thirty-seven holes, and those badly done. That night for once I did not brood over myself and my adverse fate and Magda and the medical officer, but only about brush-making. But this must have been far more welcome to my head, for I fell asleep over it, and for the first time I had a fairly good night.