Tales from the Underworld

  Have I not delighted in the aroma of wine, as I delight in the girls in their Sunday best, even though I no longer desire them? The aroma, the girls, I’ll put them in my dreams, where they won’t disappoint me as they do in life with intoxication and sobriety.

  I pour myself another glass and ask for a pen and ink. I fish the piece of paper out of my pocket and trim it to the size of a prescription block with my pocket knife. It’s not quite right, it looks too wide to me. I cut off another strip, and now it’s really much too narrow. An unusual format, where nothing about it is allowed to be unusual.

  I begin to get annoyed with myself, I hold the paper aloft and look at it, put it back on the table and look at it again. ‘Too narrow,’ I mutter crossly, ‘much too narrow,’ and my irritation grows. I take the strip I just trimmed off it and press it against the sheet with my thumb, look again and see that the format was exactly right the first time.

  I regret my impetuousness, why on earth didn’t I wait for Wolf? What do I know about prescriptions anyway? He’s the acknowledged expert! I reach for the pen and start to write. The glass is in the way, and I move it. It’s still in the way. Oh, I really can’t write like this. I reach out for the glass, and damned if I don’t knock it over and spill it all over the prescription. The blue rubber-stamped ink blurs right away, all my hopes are quashed.

  Discouraged and demoralized, I lean back. And then I suddenly understand what happened. The effect of the morphine is over, my body is hungering for more. And, abandoned by my sweetheart, of course I was incapable of doing so much as filling out a prescription.

  I get up, pay and go to meet Wolf.

  7

  My God, how full Wolf is, how utterly unutterably replete! He’s sitting there, half-horizontal, more sprawled than sat, barely capable of lifting an eyelid, dreaming and dreaming. I envy him his dreams, envy him every minute he spends in the blissful trammels of my darling, while I’m suffering inexpressibly.

  ‘Well?’ and from my wretched, collapsed gesture he reads the legend of my failure. He keeps it short. ‘Hundred,’ he says, ‘hundred mls. Here you go, Hans. And be careful, don’t overdo it, okay? So we get through the day.’

  ‘Oh, two or three mls.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says, and he’s off again. I go to the toilet, the precious stoppered bottle in my hand, I fill my five-ml syringe to the brim, and I’m happy again, I lean back.

  And … and … I’m startled awake by a quiet rattling sound. The upset bottle is next to my extended arm, its contents all over the floor. Wolf! I think. After all his struggles today Wolf will murder me when he gets to hear.

  But already I’m pouting defiantly, don’t-carishly. Who’s Wolf anyway? The associate of long morphine months, benzene hound, helper, helpee and in the end perfectly immaterial, just as everyone and everything is immaterial.

  I hold the bottle against the light: there are maybe two or three mls left. I draw them up into my syringe and treat myself to a second helping, and my blood sings and surges, lightning flowers in my brain, my heart and my breath dance together.

  The wide wild world! Wonderfully and uncomplicatedly pleasant when everyone is in it for himself, only out to sink his teeth into the other’s flanks! Off quietly to the side the adventures that will befall me on street corners at night, the walks through cornfields where I can have my way with girls, the shuttered gates to pharmacies that I can break open, the money messengers I can waylay. And there are flowers with whorled petals, and shells that sound like the dying cry of a wild beast and then the wide rushing of the sea and the gulls dipping their wingtips in the brine, and the brown fishermen’s sails and the sonorous sands.

  I am everywhere, I am everything, I alone am the world and God. I create and forget, and all fades away. O my singing blood. Penetrate more deeply into me, princess, enchant me further.

  And I fill the bottle up with water and hand it with my smiling thanks to Wolf, and he holds it up and says: ‘Three? Looks more like five to me!’

  And I say merely, ‘Five.’

  And we sit facing each other, dreaming, until he starts getting twitchy and says: ‘I want to inject again,’ and heads off.

  And then I take my hat, sneak out of the bar and get into a cab, and the whining wheels take me a long way clear of his rage.

  8

  Then I got the crazy notion of trying coke. So far I’d only tried injecting it two or three times and seen right away what deadly stuff it was.

  Flowery white Morphine is a gentle joy who makes her disciples happy. But cocaine is a red, rending beast, it tortures the body, it makes the world a wild, distorted, hateful place, knife tricks flash through its highs, blood flows, and for all that all you get from it are a few minutes of utter clarity of mind, a tying-together of remote ideas, a lucidity so dazzling that it hurts.

  But I did it, and I got some cocaine from a waiter. I made up the solution, and I sent two or three injections into my body in a very short space of time. In those moments I saw the happiness of mankind. I no longer know in what guise it appeared to me, what mask it wore, all I know is that I was standing in the middle of my room, stammering: ‘Joy, oh joy, I see it at last …’

  But even as I’m speaking, I’ve lost the scene from my mind, I can’t compel it any more, and each further injection I chase it with only makes me wilder, more furious, more demented. Pictures flash past me, bodies pile up on other bodies, individual letters in what I’m reading suddenly open their bellies, and I see they are really animals, secret, wily animals seething and swarming over the pages, pushing against each other, making strange word combinations, and I try to capture their meanings with my hand.

  But then I see that I am talking to my landlady, I am trying to tell her I won’t be wanting supper, in my mind I am forming the sentence, ‘No, I’m not hungry tonight,’ and I am perplexed to hear my mouth say, ‘Yes, I am expecting Wolf later.’ And then something infinitely quick happens that I don’t understand, I am in a temper, single words get stranded in my memory: ‘holes in the sheets – complaints – money – dishwater coffee’, a wild fury boils up in me, and I leap at my landlady and grab her by the throat. I push her blonde bulk against the wall, her watery eyes are bulging out stupidly and offensively, her head makes a small, vulgar movement onto her right shoulder and she collapses in a soft pile, her sudden torpor pulling her clear of my hands.

  For a second I am fully alert, and look around: I am sitting in some banal hotel room, a large, white featherbed is lying at the foot of the wall, where I was only now strangling my landlady. I know I am lost, totally and irrevocably lost if I can’t avail myself of this one single moment of clarity to save myself. The only thing to subdue this crazed excitement of body and mind is morphine.

  I race down the steps, barge a waiter aside, find myself outside, in a cab, going to the Pschorr.

  In the car I inject myself again, I talk with wild gesturings, the driver keeps turning round to look at me, people in the street stop transfixed at the sight of me. I see all this, and I also see that a particle of my brain sees with perfect clarity, but that this one particle is helpless against the general craziness of my body and mind. I see it is madness to inject more, but I inject more.

  At the Pschorr I ask for Wolf, I want to ask for him, my face is an uncontrollable paroxysm of muscles, I strive to speak the few words that my lucid particle up there has very slowly and distinctly prepared, only for my mouth to utter some wild drivel, and the waiter runs away, and I run out of the bar.

  I chase over to Wolf’s flat: no one home. I rush wildly through the city, here, there, continuing to inject myself, getting wilder all the time. My forearms are ballooning grotesquely, blood flows from the punctures over my shirtsleeves and cuffs, down over my hands. Madness towers menacingly above me, I giggle silently to myself as I think of a new plan to incinerate this ghastly city with its pointless pharmacies, to make it blaze like a spill of straw.

  And I’m standing in a pharmacy, I’m screaming li
ke a wild beast, I barge people aside, I smash a window pane, and suddenly they give me morphine, good, clear, white, flowery morphine.

  Oh my sweet, now I am at peace again. I can feel the cocaine fleeing from it, there is still a little bit holding out at the top of my stomach like a burning thirst, and then that too is gone.

  Several policemen lay their hands on my shoulders: ‘You’d better come along with us.’

  And I go with them, with very small, placid steps, so as not to alarm my princess, and I am blissful, because I know that I am alone with her and that nothing else matters.

  And the long torture of withdrawal begins.

  Three Years of Life

  (1925–33)

  1 The Test

  One morning I awake from the deep oblivion that stood in for sleep in those days. And suddenly I know: this can’t go on.

  I swallow half a pint of cognac, something starts to stir in my brain, my hands are not shaking quite so badly, my stomach is working instead of merely hurting, but even so: this must end.

  By and by it comes to me: today is Saturday, at eight o’clock I have to go into town, to the bank, to take out twelve thousand marks, pay in a couple of thousand somewhere else. After that I can take it easy, I don’t need to be back here for thirty-six hours.

  And while I drink the second half-pint, my brain formulates the following plan: I’ll take plenty of spending money with me, five or six hundred marks. Once I get through them, I’ll knock it off. If I bring the other money safely back from the bank, that will indicate a return to law-abiding decency.

  Then the standard office morning, and I manage to keep up appearances, as I usually do. The usual small fears creep in: won’t I have booze on my breath? Shouldn’t I eat a piece of bread – for appearances?

  An hour later the car drops me at the station. It’s still trundling back out of the forecourt while I’m checking my pockets. Sure enough, I have forgotten the main purpose of my trip, the cheque for twelve thousand marks. I stop the car, we go back, the manager calls out some instruction to me, I hurry down to the safe and grab the cheque. ‘All right, Pünder, let’s go!’

  And always at the back of my mind the thought: if I don’t make the train, this (un)controlled experiment is off.

  But I do make it, and no sooner am I sitting down than I feel a powerful thirst upon me again. Each station we stop at, I look to see if there isn’t time for at least a quick one.

  It’s seven years now that I’ve been a slave to one substance or other, it’s been morphine, cocaine, ether and alcohol. One unending round of sanatoriums, mental asylums and living ‘in the community’, albeit tethered to my addiction.

  And with it, the constant struggle for money to buy the poison devil that’s consuming me, the oh-so-clever false book-keeping to hoodwink the accountants, the constant act to keep anyone from noticing. Now I’m on my way into the city, at the cusp, maybe, of a new life.

  At the bank everything goes smoothly, they know me there, I get the money, no problem. And in another bank I pay in fifteen hundred marks. That will help hide my traces if I need to flee – after all, what fraudster would set aside some of his ill-gotten gains to pay his boss’s bills?

  After that I’m free, and take a stroll through the city. The harbour sparkles blue in the sun, people swill this way and that, talking, laughing – but my feet know where to go: they take me to the row of brothels down near the waterfront. They know me there too, and the news spreads like wildfire: Hannes is in town.

  Eventually, while they’re next door whooping it up, squabbling, showing off, crying, whatever, over champagne – my champagne – I go to the bathroom and count up what money I have left, and I see I’ve already eaten into the twelve thousand. I’ve failed the test.

  I walk out on the street, to the station. More train rattle. My flight begins. Hamburg. Most of the day asleep. At night to St Pauli. The following morning I fly to Berlin. Let them come for me. After that, Munich, Leipzig, Dresden, Cologne.

  Always the same scenario: the poison won’t let me go. I am unable to eat at all. Sleep – what passes for sleep – is a vividly tormenting blackout.

  Back in Berlin again. What am I doing there? What am I doing anywhere? I meet a girl I used to see. Maybe this time. I put my arm around her, pull her to me, and she says, ever so gently, but she says it: ‘You’re a drinker, aren’t you? Aren’t you a drinker?’

  2 Unless You Like Porridge!

  Detectives are always saying how difficult it is to apprehend a villain. My own experiences suggest the opposite: how difficult it is to get yourself arrested.

  I walk into the police station at Berlin-Zoo.* ‘I’d like you to arrest me, please.’

  ‘Why? On what grounds?’

  ‘Because a week ago, in Neustadt, I stole twelve thousand marks from accounts, and that’s on top of taking money for my own use over a number of years and disguising it by false accounting – well, that should do to be getting on with! So, arrest me!’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Hans Fallada, from Neustadt.’

  The lieutenant or whatever he is takes a long look at me. ‘Well now, wait a minute. I take it you’re telling me the truth here?’

  ‘Of course. What would be the point of lying …?’

  He goes into the other room. The only other civilians at the station besides me are a woman in floods of tears over a boy who’s been nabbed for pickpocketing and a rowdy drunk who claims he’s been robbed of some money. A sergeant is attempting to pacify him, but he gets angrier and angrier, till the man questioning me turns towards him – and just then the crying woman whispers in my direction: ‘Get out of here while you can, you melvin! Unless you like porridge!’

  And everything goes on, the questioning, the crying, the muttering of the drunk, while I consider what ‘melvin’ and ‘porridge’ might mean. Eventually I will have three years in which to learn that a ‘melvin’ is a fool, and that ‘porridge’ is criminal slang for doing time.

  The lieutenant comes back. ‘They’re not looking for you. I suggest you go home and sleep it off.’

  ‘But I just told you I’ve stolen twelve thousand marks …’

  ‘Just you and your drunken stories get out of here. Or do you want me to have you thrown out?’

  ‘But someone must have reported …’

  ‘Not a word about it on our list of open investigations. Now will you cut along, we’ve got work to do here.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a pittance, twelve thousand …’

  ‘I’m going to count to three – one, two …’

  ‘In Neustadt, I …’

  ‘Three! Right. Scharf, Blunck, throw this drunken idiot out of here!’

  So I go.

  3 Flying Squad

  Three hours later – by now it’s one in the morning – I’m standing in the Rotes Schloss* on the Alex outside the door marked ‘Flying Squad’. I knock and enter.

  There are a dozen or so men seated round a big table. Some of them are reading, some are talking, most are smoking, and all of them are looking bored. I walk up to them and say: ‘I’d like to be arrested, please. I’ve embezzled twenty or thirty thousand marks.’

  They all turn towards me and take me in. Then, apparently spontaneously, without looking at each other, they seem to come to some consensus. They go back to reading the paper, chatting, smoking, being bored, and only one of them, with a straggly grey moustache, says to me: ‘I think you must have had a few too many.’

  Don’t explain, I think, and I say: ‘You know, sometimes you need a drink to get your courage up.’

  ‘True enough,’ he agrees, looks at me again, and then asks me for name, address, type of crime. My answers seem to satisfy him, because he says to one of the others: ‘Willi, will you go through the wanted list for me.’

  ‘I’m not on it.’

  ‘Oh? What makes you so sure? Do you think Count Totz is happy to let you have thirty thousand of his marks?’

  I tell
him what happened with the police at the station.

  ‘Well, sit here a minute then.’ And he and Willi both go next door.

  I sit there on my own, not bothered by anyone. I get up, stretch my legs, fish a cigarette out of my pocket, the last one, and light it. Take a couple more steps, till I’m standing by the door. I look round: they’re all still reading, drowsing, bored.

  I push the door open, not especially cautiously, just the way anyone might open a door, and stand out in the passage. The door shuts after me, I walk on, I’m out on the pavement, no one stops me. And then I turn and go back inside.

  The grey moustache returns. ‘I’ve just called our boys at the Zoo. It seems you really did put in an appearance there.’

  For the second time, everyone turns and stares at me. The fact that I was truthful, and that I am presenting myself for arrest a second time, is enough, it seems, to change me from a pig-headed drunk wasting police time to a subject of interest. I am brought a chair, a packet of cigarettes is put out on the table, they want to take a statement from me.

  But first of all it’s: ‘Empty your pockets on the table!’

  I do so. Predictably, it’s my purse and my wallet that provoke the most interest. Then consternation: ‘Is that all the money you have?’

  There are seven marks twenty pfennigs lying on the table.

  ‘So that’s why you’ve come to us! Because you’ve run out of ideas!’

  Interest in me is gone again, the cigarettes are taken away (‘you’ve smoked enough for the next few years’), the statement is taken in next to no time, and by two o’clock I’m in the cell, duly arrested.

  4 Bedbugs

  My first sense on awakening is that I must still be dreaming. Right in front of my eyes, so close that they seem monstrously large, are two broad, brownish, armoured insects. My head jerks back, I feel a horrible itching on my face and arms and I think: bedbugs.