The Drinker (23 page)

51

The days went by, one after another, and one day, before I had expected, I was a tolerable brush-maker. I had learned it, I made nailbrushes and hand-brushes and hair-brushes and dairy-brushes and windowsill-brushes. I could make brooms too, millet brooms and fine hair brooms. Eventually I learnt to make shaving-brushes and dusting-brushes and all kinds of paint-brushes. My fingers were now as skilled as Lexer’s, they took up just as many bristles as were necessary, neither more nor less, and the wire gave me no more trouble. Now when I met Lexer in the leisure-hour and he shouted at me in his shrill voice: “Well, Sommer, how many have you done?” I would answer: “Eight hundred holes,” or: “a thousand,” or even: “eleven hundred.”

Then Lexer would pull an angry face and yell: “Are you trying to suck up to the bosses? You won’t get any better grub than the rest of us, you arse-creeper!”

But I did not work so hard in order to curry favour, I worked for my own satisfaction. Work passed the time for me; before I expected it, the key would rattle and the keeper’s voice cried: “Lunch-time!”

The days, long as they sometimes seemed to be individually, went quickly enough: a week, a month had passed, I said to myself: “Now I’ve been here a month already, now two, now nearly three.…”

Now that my hands did the work of their own accord, now that I no longer had to think and worry about it all the time, my mind was free to reflect and brood on my own fate. But work imparted quite a different tone even to this brooding. Sometimes I stood for a while by the window and looked out over the country, in which they were already cutting the corn, then bringing it in, then ploughing the stubble, then mowing the hay. I had a good bright cell which, so they told me, kept warm even in winter. I looked out, and when my heart plagued and urged me to get out into freedom again, it was probably the work which made me say to myself: “Patience, it’ll all come right. For the time being, let’s get on with finishing this lot of washing-up brushes!”

Yes, I enjoyed my work. It was humble work that, sure enough, any child and almost any of my feeble-minded companions could have done, but there is always consolation in a job well done, however insignificant it may be.

I had no fear of the punishment-cells now, nor of the work inspector; he occasionally came into my cell to take the finished work away, and he never said a hard word to me, but often: “Good, good, Sommer.” Or perhaps: “You needn’t do more than your quota, Sommer, it’s not necessary.”

And once he gave me a crust with jam on. When my first month’s work was finished, I lined up with the other workers outside the glass box and drew the tobacco which had been bought out of my “wages” (four pfennigs a day, one mark a month), namely, one packet of fine-cut and one packet of shag. Half the shag I swapped for a little pipe, for I did not want to roll cigarettes in newspaper like the others, it always either blazed up or else it charred and tasted horrible. The bowl of my pipe was quite small, it only held enough tobacco for ten or twelve pulls; that was fine, I could have five smokes a day and still last the whole month. Not that first month though, for I was still foolish and let myself be talked out of some of it, and lent some which I never saw again. I learnt, too, the dread which all property-owners have of thieves; nothing in the cells was safe from them, however cleverly it might be hidden. Constantly the agonised cry echoed through the building: “They’ve pinched my tobacco!”

So we were obliged to carry all our belongings about with us in our pockets, even the spoon which was our only eating utensil, much to the annoyance of the head-keeper, who complained of all the bulges in our clothes. I got myself a small box in which I kept all my possessions, a little salt, perhaps a saved-up piece of bread, my pipe and tobacco. I always had this by me, in the mess-room and the lavatory, in bed, and even on my visits to the doctor. Later, the kindly Qual who was working in the carpenter’s shop, made me a little wooden box with a sliding lid and a handle of string, and would take nothing for it. Yes, now I was really enrolled, I belonged, and to tell the truth, after those first few weeks of getting used to the place, I did not feel too bad about it. I became accustomed to starvation, constant quarrels, bad air and boils, and many of my companions who were unresponsive and dull I just did not notice any more. I belonged; and yet I did not quite belong, I was only “provisionally admitted”, and later I was merely “pending report”. One day, my hearing would be held, I would serve my sentence for uttering threats, and then—I hope, I hope!—I would be able to return to freedom. What I was going to do there, I did not know. It seemed fairly certain to me that I would not go home to Magda, nor did I want to work in my old business again.

The time I spent in my cell, this constant isolation, had made me rather shy of my fellow-men, I preferred to be in the narrow room among my brushes, and I thought with aversion of the noisy crowded streets of my home town. I had the notion of going to some quiet village and spending the evening of my life there as an unknown, rapidly-ageing man, in a quiet room in which I could go on making brushes.…

I imagined something of the sort. Yes, a little joy had come back to me, an almost cosy contentment filled me—this time is best compared with the time I spent in the wood-yard of the remand prison. True, Mordhorst was lacking here but I did not really miss him. Mordhorst had always been driving on, complaining and agitating—and now I was all for peace. This place was horrible, with its filth and meanness and envy, but that was how it was, and what was the use of rebelling against it? We prisoners, we patients, were not worth it.

At the end of the second month I swapped my whole packet of fine-cut tobacco for a rimmed magnifying glass and now I could always light my pipe, even in my work-cell, provided the sun was shining. I imagined myself richer and happier than ever before when I leaned by my window and smoked my little pipe. I felt I had never enjoyed my life so deeply or been so happy as here in my warm cell. Perhaps the contentment of my cell-mate Holz, his gift for extracting pleasure from the slightest things, had already affected me.

52

In the quiet peacefulness of those days, my interviews with the doctor were the only disturbing thing, and their effect lasted but a few days at most, before I had become completely at ease again and returned to my calm and agreeable condition. On the whole the interviews did not go favourably for me, though none were as bad as that first one. Unfortunately it was quite impossible for me to behave naturally with him, in my dealings with him I never achieved that freedom and self-assurance which, outside, would have been so much a matter of course for me. I was always oppressed by a dark sense of guilt, as if I had at all costs to hide something from him. I was never quite free of my fear of his hidden cunning and trickery; at the most innocent question I was hunted by one thought: “What’s he trying to trip me with now?”

I never thought of him as the helpful doctor, only as the ally of the Public Prosecutor who in a confused and difficult moment had charged me with the attempted murder of my wife, and who would do anything to keep me inside these walls.

Whenever I really managed to overcome my feelings, and to tell the doctor what moved my heart, it unfailingly ended in disappointment. For instance, one day I told him quite freely about my changed plans for the future, how I was going to retire to some quiet village and just live by brush-making. I had expected to get the doctor’s approval of this plan, his praise even, and I was astonished and disappointed beyond measure when he vigorously shook his head and said: “Those are just fantasies, you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. You can’t live like that, and you don’t want to. You need your fellow-men, and above all, Sommer, you need a helping and guiding hand. No, that only comes from that quite unwarranted aversion of yours to your wife. Get the idea out of your head that your wife wants to harm you. You are the one who has wronged her and if your wife weren’t such a decent sort she would have every reason for being a bit spiteful towards you. But she hasn’t given a single unfavourable word of evidence against you, she tries to excuse you all the time! And here you tell me you don’t want to live and work with her any longer! What a fellow you are, Sommer! Can’t you see anything as it really is? Must you always invent some rigmarole?”

Naturally I was bewildered and indignant at this unwarranted attack; as Magda had not written me a line and never made any attempt to see me, I quite justifiably assumed that I was irksome to her, that she considered me dead and buried. And, as is the custom, she spoke no ill of the dead. But it was decent of me to keep quietly out of her way, to make no trouble for her, to leave her in full possession of my property. That the doctor refused to acknowledge my generosity, and instead assailed me with hard spiteful words, proved to me how prejudiced he was against me, and that made me keep my mouth shut all the tighter in future, made me still more reticent and shy. Really he was nothing but my enemy, a pitiless enemy who tried by all the means at his disposal to outwit me and who unscrupulously used his weight as head of the institution against me. The other prisoners had been right when they constantly warned me of him.

“Don’t trust that Stiebing! He’s friendly to your face, but behind your back he makes a report about you so you never get out of this hole alive!”

They were right.

During these few weeks, the doctor did not often send for me, and his demands on me did not become more frequent after he informed me that he had now been asked to prepare my report. Quite the reverse, in fact, another proof that he had a preconceived opinion about me, and did not want to find out anything further. In general, unless there was something specially urgent, the medical officer visited the institution twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday evening. But I was sent for much more rarely, hardly once a week. Of course I rather welcomed this, since every visit was, as I have said, a torture that took me days to recover from. But these rare summonses showed me, too, how lightly he took this report on which the fate of my whole life depended. Yet in itself, my case was a particularly interesting one for a psychiatrist. In education, I was head and shoulders above the other inmates, I had achieved something in my lifetime, I was a respected man—and now I was in this death-house. The medical officer must have been able to see there was more in me than in the others, I had more to lose, I was more sensitive, too, and more prone to suffering than these utterly dull, stupid fellows. But no, he treated me like any Tom, Dick or Harry, he was often quite rude to me, called me an incorrigible liar and romancer! I had every reason to mistrust him and to be on my guard. When he upbraided me for my lack of frankness, that was just one of his baseless charges, to which I remained completely silent.

53

A change in my relations to the doctor only came when he visited me in my cell one day at an unusual hour—early in the afternoon, in fact. I had just been smoking, which is forbidden in the work-cells, but he made no comment on the tobacco-laden atmosphere, even although he usually insisted on a strict observance of the regulations. That day, he was not wearing his light doctor’s overall, and was without his eternal shadow, the head-nurse. For a moment Dr Stiebing looked at my work and then asked absently: “Well, how are you getting on with the brush-making, Sommer?”

“Quite well, doctor,” I answered. “I think the work-inspector is pleased with me.”

He nodded, still rather absently, my good work did not seem to interest him much. He reached in his pocket, took out a silver cigarette case, and then he did something that completely astonished me, that almost bowled me over: he offered me the case.

I looked at him disbelievingly, and a thin smile lay on his face as he said: “You can quite safely take one, Sommer, if your doctor offers it to you.”

He even gave me a light first, and then stood for a moment calmly smoking under the high-set cell-window, in silence.

Then he said: “I had a long talk about you yesterday with your wife, Herr Sommer. I had asked her to come in and see me some time, and yesterday she came.”

I did not answer, I only looked at him, my heart hammered; it moved me, it shook me that this man had been with Magda just yesterday. I could not speak, I think I was trembling in every limb.

“Yes,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “I got your wife to go over everything again, from the very beginning of your marriage, up to that unfortunate evening. A psychiatrist hears much more from relatives than they themselves would guess.”

A wave of furious indignation began to rise in me. “So you’ve been trying to trick Magda too, and very likely have tricked her,” I thought. “Magda is so innocent, she has no notion what sort of man you are!”

But the wave ebbed away again.

He said: “On the whole, I have a not unfavourable impression from this account of your wife’s. I really think it is possible we may be able to do something with you, Sommer. You have a very brave and efficient wife.…”

Again I felt on the defensive: I would have preferred that the doctor had used some other word than “efficient” in connection with Magda.

“Yes, Sommer, of course I can’t say anything definite just yet, I’ll have to keep you here under observation for a few weeks more. But if you go on behaving quietly and working hard, and if nothing special happens …”

“Nothing special will happen, doctor,” I cried excitedly, “I’ll go on behaving quietly and working hard …”

The doctor smiled again, and in that very moment when he was being so kind to me, I did not like his superior smile at all.

“Well,” he said, “we keep all temptations away from you here, Sommer! To behave yourself here means nothing much. You have to be sure that you can resist every temptation outside, particularly alcohol …”

“I’ll never touch alcohol again,” I assured him. “I decided that long ago. Not even a glass of beer. I’m going to be a total abstainer, I give you my firm promise on that, doctor.”

“Oh Sommer,” he said sadly, “you’d better not promise me anything, what sort of promises do you think I get to hear, when people want to get out of this place? And three months outside, one month even, and one man’s stealing again, the other drinking. No, I don’t think anything of promises—I’ve been disappointed too often.”

“But I really have changed,” I said and for the first time I could speak quite frankly to the doctor. “I would never have believed that it could happen to me. I thought I could do anything I liked, and Magda spoilt me, too, in that respect. But now that I’ve seen what has come from my drinking, this is going to be a lesson to me for ever. When I am tempted, and I look back on the weeks and months in this place …”

I shuddered. The medical officer watched me attentively.

“That was honestly spoken, Sommer,” he said at last. “If this experience has given you such a shock that it has quite cured you of drinking, then we really can take a chance on it. But now you’ll have to try to put your attitude towards your wife in order as well. You’re an easily-offended man, Herr Sommer, but I must tell you quite frankly that in your marriage, your wife is the guiding hand, the superior partner. She’s your good angel, Sommer, and when you drifted away from her, you fell. So get used to the idea that your wife only has the best intentions towards you, subordinate yourself to her a little.… There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, it doesn’t make a henpecked husband of you. It’s a good thing when the weaker one lets himself be sheltered and guided by the stronger.…”

So the doctor went on talking to me for a long time. It was not easy for me to hear him out without contradiction. It really was not quite as he imagined. Certainly Magda was efficient, but ever since we owned the house, I had managed the business perfectly well without her. True, lately things had not gone so well as before, but that was due to other causes, a few unfortunate accidents, not to my bad management. But anyway, once I got out of this accursed place, I would find my feet again. Let Magda be the guiding hand, I wouldn’t make any trouble for her. So I kept silent and I was reconciled to my new position
vis à vis
Magda by the thought that she had spoken so well of me to the doctor. So she still loved me!

“So,” said the doctor finally, “I don’t promise you anything definite, I can’t do so. In let’s say three or four weeks’ time I shall present my report, then the court will arrange your hearing, you will get a light sentence, perhaps four weeks, perhaps only fourteen days.…”

“So little?” I cried in astonishment.

“Well, you had better ask a lawyer about that, I don’t want to raise any false hopes. I’m only a doctor. And then when you are at liberty again.…”

“I shall always think of this place, doctor, I promise you!” I concluded.