Having sent the letter, he was overcome with regret. This was unworthy of him; he had sunk to the level of his enemies, instead of just quietly despising them, which had been his stance up until now. But the time would come when he would regret this letter even more. One morning, he walked into the waiting room at the station — and there was Piglet Willem, sitting on the sofa, with a bottle of wine in front of him!
Doll wished he could have turned around in the doorway and left, and it would certainly have been better for his peace of mind if he had. But as well as many strangers, there were also quite a few locals in the room, who were now looking back and forth expectantly from him to the vet. Doll knew that Wilhelm, like all old gossips, had shown the letter to the bar-room regulars and half the town, and his enemy’s threat — to slap him in the face when he saw him — was common knowledge. If Doll retreated now, the vet would have won, and the whole rumour mill would start up again.
So Doll entered the room and sat down opposite the other man. The landlord, normally so talkative, said nothing as he brought him the bottle he had ordered. All the locals were waiting for the strangers to leave the waiting room — their train was due to depart in a quarter of an hour. Meanwhile Doll sat clutching the stem of his wine glass, battling inwardly with himself. He’s not worth it, a little voice said inside him. He’s just an old man, a gossip, and a scandalmonger. What’s he got to do with your honour? And with a quick glance at the other man, who was sitting there in silence, like him, clutching his wine glass: But they’ll think me a coward, all of them, and him especially, if I do nothing. I’ve got to show these people that I won’t just take this lying down! I can’t back out now!
The strangers filed out of the waiting room, and only five or six locals were left. The room was completely silent. Then the landlord Kurz, who was polishing his glasses behind the counter and watching like a hawk, began to pass the time of day with a painter and decorator. ‘They’re in for another bad day in Berlin’, Doll heard him say, as the drone of enemy bomber formations passing overhead came to their ears …
Now he got to his feet directly in front of his own enemy. Leaning on the edge of the table with both hands, he thrust his face into the odious, yellow, liverish visage of the other man, and asked in a whisper: ‘So are you going to take back your vicious lies right now, in front of these people?’
The landlord was at his side now, and said in a tone that was half-plea, half-reprimand: ‘Don’t do that, Dr. Doll! I won’t have any fighting in my establishment! Go outside, if you want to …’
Doll carried on regardless, speaking softly as before: ‘Or do you want me to slap you in the face, right here in public? Punish you like a child who has been telling lies?’
The elderly, heavily built man had stayed sitting still in his seat on the sofa. Under Doll’s menacing gaze, the yellowish colour of his face changed slowly to an ashen grey, while his fishy eye stared at his oppressor without blinking and without visible expression. When Doll finished speaking, it was as if he wanted to say something in reply: his lips moved, and the tip of his tongue came out as if to moisten them, but no sound emerged.
‘Look, I think you should leave, Dr. Doll!’ said the landlord with urgent insistence. ‘You can see that Dr. Wilhelm is sorry …’
At this point, the old vet suddenly began to shake his head with a weirdly mechanical persistence, like some nodding Buddha.
‘Pssst! Pssst!’ said the landlord, as if he was shooing some hens away. ‘Don’t do it, Willem!’
For a moment Doll had stared fixedly at this Buddha-like figure shaking his head, but now he raised his hand and slapped the slanderer lightly in the face with his open palm.
At this, the witnesses to this scene vented their collective relief with a long-suppressed ‘Ah!’
‘That’s it!’ said the landlord, plainly relieved that the slap had not been harder — and that Wilhelm had not hit back.
For a moment Doll had gazed into the face of his enemy, with a look that was both menacing and relieved. The violent urges that fought within him had calmed down; he was finally free again, free from hatred and free from anger. But then something awful happened, something utterly unexpected: two large, clear tears welled up from the expressionless eyes of the old man. For a moment, they hung on the edge of his eyelids, then rolled slowly down his cheeks. More tears followed, more and more, until they were streaming down his leathery nutcracker face, making it all shiny. His throat began to heave and sob: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ sobbed the old vet. ‘Oh, my God, he hit me, he hit me in the face with his hand! What am I to do?! Oh! Oh! Oh! I can’t look anyone in the face any more, I shall have to kill myself! Oh! Oh! Oh!’
When Doll struck him, the sympathies of everyone in the room were undoubtedly on his side, as attested by the deep sigh of relief that came from their throats. But the old vet’s tears changed all that. Doll was convinced from the outset that they were only crocodile tears, carefully calculated to negate the effect of his chastisement and get the townsfolk on the victim’s side.
‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ sobbed Dr. Wilhelm, as the tears continued to flow. ‘He hit me — today of all days, on my sixty-third birthday! And I’ve never done anything to him. I’ve always stood up for him when other people were speaking ill of him. I was so grateful to him for all the wine he gave me!’
At these last words, Doll felt all his anger and hatred flare up again. He vividly recalled the whole episode where he had forced the vet to leave the table because he was helping himself too freely to the wine. The slanderous rumours had begun, not because he had given him so much wine on so many occasions, but because he had once refused him wine. ‘That’s enough!’ he cried angrily. ‘You’re just an old scandalmonger and gossip, and that’s why I slapped you. And if you carry on with your lies here, I’ll slap you again — never mind your fake tears!’ And he raised his hand as if to strike.
But Doll had reckoned without the other people in the room. They should have known what kind of a man old Piglet Willem was, and indeed they knew him of old, and thought very little of him. But in the face of these tears and laments, they promptly cast experience aside and abandoned their reason. The sight of an old man breaking down in sobs always touches the emotions, and so they all now ganged up on Doll, led by the landlord of the station bar: ‘Look here, that’s enough now! Surely you’re not going to hit the old man again! I think it’s best if you leave now — you can take your open bottle of wine with you!’
And in an instant, Doll was hustled away from his enemy, he was handed his hat, the landlord quickly put a stopper in the wine bottle and placed it in his briefcase, and the next moment Doll found himself standing outside on the station forecourt. Looking troubled as he gazed at him through bloodshot eyes, the landlord said: ‘You never should have done that, Mr. Doll. You’ll turn the whole town against you now! A gentleman doesn’t do that kind of thing — hitting people! Well, maybe it’ll all come right in the end …’
But unfortunately it didn’t all come right. Instead it was the landlord who was right: Doll forfeited all remaining sympathy in the town, and he became what he would forever remain: the most hated man far and wide.
Dr. Wilhelm exploited the situation with devilish cunning; on this occasion, his bilious brain counselled him most wisely. After Doll’s departure he had carried on weeping, and averred in a sobbing voice that he could not live with this dishonour. He would have to take his own life, and on his birthday, of all days …
They gave him wine to drink to calm him down — a great deal of wine — and then they took him home. But the news of his public humiliation soon went round the whole town, and aroused sympathy even in places where he had never attracted any before. His reiterated lament — that it was all so much worse because it had happened on his birthday — was not without effect: days later, he was still getting presents, in the form of food, wine, and schnaps, from people who would never have dreamed of ma
rking the old sponger’s birthday, were it not for this incident.
Meanwhile the war dragged on — another year, another two years. People had more important things to worry about now than Doll and his despicable conduct.
Doll himself had other things to think about, too. This was the year in which his marriage was dissolved. He had many cares and worries, and so it was all the more painful to feel the old hatred, which he thought he had put behind him, welling up within him again at the sight of the vet, still as strong as ever, undiminished by the passage of time, still the same old feelings of humiliation …
And then the young woman turned up in the town again after a long absence. This time, she was dressed in black. Doll learned that she had been a widow for quite some time. When people heard this news, they studied his face with eager curiosity, but failed to detect anything but indifference. And indifference was exactly what Doll felt. If he had felt something more for this woman two years previously, in a moment of passion, all that was long since forgotten, and he no longer remembered …
But life in a small town is lived according to different rules. In a city, people’s paths cross and they never meet again. But here was this outsider, Doll, a man who, despite his money, only aroused suspicion with his high-handed ways. And now there was this young woman, clearly widowed, twenty-three years old, no more, though she was already the mother of a five-year-old child, wearing her widow’s weeds with painted fingernails and dark-red lipstick. The small town knew what to make of such a woman, just as it knew all about Doll!
Faced with a united front against them, excluded from the life of the community, spied upon, suspected, maligned, they were bound to meet and find common cause sooner or later.
‘Hello!’ said Doll nervously. ‘It’s a long time since we last saw each other …’
‘Yes’, she replied. ‘And a lot has happened since then.’
‘Of course!’ he remembered, and looked at the young woman. He thought her even more beautiful in her widow’s weeds. ‘You lost your husband …’
‘Yes’, she said. ‘It’s been very difficult at times. My husband was ill for more than a year, and I nursed him myself throughout. Every time the siren went, I had to get myself and him down to the basement, and him a sick man, the apartment half-gutted by fire …’
‘Difficult times!’ he agreed, and then laughed scornfully at the inquisitive look they got from a passing local, the wife of a naval lieutenant. ‘But this place hasn’t changed — by this evening, we’ll be the talk of the town again.’
‘Yes, I’m sure!’ she agreed. ‘Will you walk with me a little? If they’re going to gossip, let’s give them something to gossip about! Would you like to have lunch with me today? I’ve just got a chicken from a farmer — that way’, she smiled, ‘you won’t need ration coupons.’
‘All right!’ he replied. ‘Gladly. I don’t have to answer to anyone any more.’
‘I know’, she said.
That was how it all began, and everything else followed on from that. They were drawn to each other out of defiance, protest, a sense of isolation within the community. At last, they thought, someone I can really talk to, who won’t betray me. Over time, this became something more — genuine affection, love even. They had long since ceased to care about the small-town gossip. They moved in together, living in the little chalet that belonged to the young woman, putting two fingers up to the scandalised locals. Nor did Doll care any more that Wilhelm the vet — so everyone was saying — was now telling all and sundry ‘I told you so’, claiming that every word of what he’d said before had been ‘right on the money’. Let his enemy crow: Doll couldn’t care less.
But later on, after they had married, not in the little country town but in the big city of Berlin, and were sitting together in the kitchen of their badly fire-damaged apartment, writing out addresses for the wedding announcements — then the old hatred rose up again in both of them, and they did not forget a single one of their enemies. Every one of them received their wedding announcement, and Piglet Willem and the hotelier’s sanctimonious wife were top of the list! What effect they thought these announcements would have, they wouldn’t have been able to say exactly. But to them it was something of a triumph just to have married — in defiance of them all, a poke in the eye for prudery!
From Berlin, they went back to the small town only on the odd occasion. They often forgot about the place for days on end in the chaos of the big city, in its gathering gloom, relieved only by the ghastly flickering firelight of whole streets in flames. They sat with each other in air-raid shelters that afforded little protection, heard the drone of the approaching bombers and the impacts of the bombs getting closer and closer … They held each other tightly, and the young woman spoke words of reassurance: ‘They’ve gone on!’ Then there was a deafening cracking and crashing sound, the light flashed bright yellow and died … They could taste plaster dust in their mouths, as if they were eating their own death.
But when they had fought their way out of Berlin again, passing railway tracks and stations destroyed by the bombing, when the train took them deeper and deeper into forests that appeared completely untouched by the war, and when in the evening, before embarking on the last homeward stretch, they entered the station bar again to have a quick beer, they found everything just as it had always been. The landlord had become a little more mean with his provisions and a little more insolent towards his patrons, but the leathery old vet was still sitting in his usual place on the sofa.
But the moment Doll saw this man again, the old hatred suddenly flared up within him once more. It erupted with elemental force, and it was only later that the memories of all the trouble this man had caused them came back to him, as if to rationalise the feeling after the event — for all the good that did him. This hatred seemed senseless to Doll, when there was so much hardship to be borne in these times, and when life itself felt like a new gift after every air raid. This mean-spirited hatred seemed senseless to him, and yet he had to deal with it somehow. He had made room for this hatred in his heart, had allowed it to lodge itself there — and now he had to live with it, probably for the rest of time.
For the rest of time — but, as it turned out, only for the rest of the other man’s time. When he walked past the old vet’s closed-up house now on his way to work with his young wife, the place looking so gloomy and forbidding, or when he passed the battered old brass plate, flecked with verdigris, on his way home by himself, he averted his gaze from the house — but not because he still hated the dead man. No: the hatred had gone when he died, and in its place was a kind of emptiness, a vague memory of a feeling that he had felt ashamed of. In this time of the country’s collapse and defeat, no feelings lasted for long; the hatred passed away, leaving only emptiness, deadness, and indifference behind, and people seemed remote, out of reach. Never had he felt so alone. No man had ever felt so alone. Only the young woman was still with him. But he let her know, too: ‘Let’s leave it there. We won’t talk about it again. The subject is closed.’
No: there was another reason why Doll averted his gaze from this house of the dead. There was one thing that he kept on turning over in his mind: I saw him sitting there in the station bar, with tears streaming down his face, and telling everyone he would have to take his own life because of the humiliation he had suffered. But the old whinger hadn’t taken his life: instead he had turned his humiliation into a business opportunity, without dignity or shame! He’d been a coward all his life, this Dr. Wilhelm, scared of being kicked by a horse, gored by a cow, or bitten by a dog, and reduced to giving injections to pigs when they were too young to be dangerous: Piglet Willem! The nickname was well-deserved, and he had never protested when they called him that and ribbed him mercilessly for filling his glass at somebody else’s expense … he’d always been a man without dignity or courage.
And yet, Doll brooded, this same Dr. Wilhelm had the courage to d
o what I lack the courage to do — even though my own dignity and self-respect, shame, faith, and hope are ebbing away with every passing day. I can’t do it, and yet I have always imagined myself to be a moderately courageous man. But he was able to do it, coward though he was. The coward whose face I slapped, he had the courage — and I don’t.
Such were Doll’s thoughts as he walked past this house, painful thoughts that tormented him every time; he would have given anything to be free of them, but they wouldn’t let him go, whether he averted his gaze or not. Then he would try to picture the room where this man had spent the last hour of his life, the room where he had done ‘it’. Doll knew that at the end the old vet had owned virtually nothing apart from a bed, a table, and a chair. Everything else had gone to pay for alcohol. He tried to picture the man sitting on this solitary chair, the pistol lying on the table in front of him. Perhaps the tears had been streaming down his face again, and perhaps he had sat there sobbing ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ again …
Doll shook his head. He didn’t want to picture the scene; it was just too painful.
But one thing was certain: the old man with the leathery skin had gone, and Doll was left behind, empty inside, filled with self-reproach and doubt. So many certainties had been thrown into doubt at this time, and because of the old vet, Doll now lost both his inveterate hatred and his belief in himself as a man of courage. In all probability he was nothing at all, an empty husk; he had nourished himself with self-delusions, and now it had all vanished into thin air! There was no Doll any more.
How gladly he would have taken a different route, avoiding this closed-up house altogether. But the position of the town, sitting as it did on a peninsula, forced him to walk past it every time. Forced him to revisit these painful thoughts. Forced from him the admission that he was nothing, had never amounted to anything, and for the rest of his life, however long or short that might be, would never be anything other than a nobody. A nobody, for all time!