Iron Gustav

  ‘I don’t want any visitors. Who is it?’

  ‘Come along, no nonsense. The permit’s already been granted. Come on!’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Your brother, I think …’

  ‘Eva!’

  ‘Heinz!’

  Silence …

  (Nothing is to be mentioned about the case.)

  ‘How are things with you?’

  ‘Better, thanks.’

  The official raised his head. Was that an allusion?

  ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘No, thanks. I have all I need.’

  ‘And money, too, Eva? I would see if … I’m in a job now.’

  ‘No, thanks. I need nothing.’

  Silence. Both agonized over what they should talk about. No mention to be made of the case. And yet the case was the only topic they could talk about. How empty life had suddenly become! In this bare, shabby visitors’ room, with a wooden barrier in the middle and an official looking wearily at the clock to see how the five minutes were progressing, all that existed was Eva’s case. All other human relationships had vanished – they no longer existed, gone! Only the thing they were not allowed to talk about remained.

  ‘I’ve been living at Tutti’s for the last four years. Did you know?’

  ‘Yes – no, I haven’t heard. I’ve not been out of the house for a long time – months.’

  The official lifted his head, looked sharply at them and tapped the desk with his pencil. He was not a fussy man but everything was possible; the prisoner’s statement that she had not been out of the house for months might be a hint to the brother about building up an alibi.

  Once more the conversation froze; brother and sister looked at each other. The once so familiar faces had grown strange. What was there to say between them?

  ‘Tutti’s boys are so big now. You knew that she had two boys? Otto is six and Gustav eleven; splendid little chaps. They always keep us cheerful.’

  ‘I can well believe it.’ Timidly she went on: ‘How did you know?’

  He understood her at once. ‘I was asked to go to the police station – to make a statement.’

  The official tapped admonishingly.

  But she: ‘Do our parents know?’

  ‘Up to last Saturday they didn’t. Shall I go there?’

  ‘Yes, please. Tell them … tell them … no, don’t say anything.’

  Silence again. If only these interminable five minutes would end. I couldn’t help her when she was at liberty. How can I help her in here?

  ‘Would you like me to get you something to eat? Biscuits or fruit? Or would you like some cigarettes?’

  ‘No, thanks. I need nothing.’

  The official got up. ‘Visiting time over.’

  Very quickly: ‘Goodbye, Eva, keep your end up.’

  ‘Goodbye, Heinz.’

  ‘Oh, God, Eva – fool that I am – have you a solicitor?’

  ‘You must go now. Visiting time is over.’

  ‘Yes, I have. Don’t bother about anything. And don’t come again. Never again!’

  ‘You’re to go now, do you hear?’ said the official.

  Eva, almost screaming: ‘Tell our parents I’m dead, that I died long ago – nothing is left of their Eva.’

  ‘Stop that! You never come out with anything till the very last moment. Listen, if you do that again when I’ve said “Time’s up”, I’ll report you and you’ll get no more visitors at all.’

  ‘I didn’t want any visitors. I’ve told you that already.’

  ‘Then you should have shut up. But to start shouting when it’s too late – you all do that. Oh, stop talking. Go back to your cell!’

  § IX

  A prison is a complicated edifice made secure a dozen times over by walls, locks, bolts and bars; a complex mechanism with officials to keep an eye on the prisoners and with senior officials to keep an eye on the officials; not forgetting clocking-in apparatus, regular and surprise inspections, the censorship of letters and prisoners spying on prisoners … A net skilfully woven, mesh upon mesh, so that nothing can slip through. Moreover the women’s wing lies isolated from the men’s prison. Yet twenty-four hours had not elapsed since the arrest of Eugen Bast and Eva Hackendahl, before a prisoner carrying round food had slipped a note into Eva’s hand, the first warning from the blind master to his slave: even in prison you’re not free.

  That first day she had walked up and down her cell from wall to wall, from door to window, passing between her fellow prisoners as if she did not see them. This was permissible – hers being a serious case, she commanded their respect. Continually the door was flung open: ‘Hackendahl for examination.’

  The others could wait for three days – no examining magistrate demanded them. She, however, was being asked for all the time.

  A case has only to be very good or very bad … the stupid are easily impressed. Eva impressed them: ‘What can have been eating her?’ they asked. ‘She doesn’t look like one of those.’

  ‘Idiot! It’s just the ones who don’t look like it who are the worst. I once saw a poisoner who looked just like my grandmother …’

  ‘No wonder, if your grandmother looked anything like you!’

  Eva paced up and down. She accepted the respect of the others just as she accepted prison itself. It was outside her, far away, meaningless. Inside she was still cooped up with Eugen Bast, slave to a blind man. She had told Heinz the truth; it had been many, many months since she had last been out of doors. Eugen Bast had kept her like a prisoner. A professional blind beggar, he also accepted chairs for re-caning. He did not do this work himself, of course – that was her job – but it gave him a pretext to get into people’s flats and spy out the land for his friends. No one ever suspected the poor blind man led by a small boy; yes, he was cunning, was Eugen Bast.

  Monotonous as life had become for Eva, it was not so terrible as in the early years before she had got used to his sway, the years when she still dreamed of freedom and escape, dreams for which she no longer had the will. She had become dulled, she accepted everything. When he thrashed her she wept and said nothing; she cried for as long as he pulled her hair (which she found particularly painful – much more so than the beatings), but in the end he stopped both the beatings and the hair-pulling.

  It was just this apathy which infuriated him constantly. He was not uninventive. Nobody could deny him a certain talent in the discovery of new torments, but they had ceased to have an effect on her – the dull bitch! Had she not been useful he would have thrown her out long ago; Eugen Bast, though, was not so young as he once was. Blind, he could not get around so easily. He had become fat, comfort-loving; appreciative of order, cleanliness, good eating. And these things she saw to, she who cost him no more than the food she ate and who, in addition, was reliable – no chatterer; without a word of protest, blinder than the blind, she refused not one task.

  Eugen Bast himself could no longer take part in burglaries, or force girls to walk the streets for him, but after his first rage he had soon come to realize that the man behind the scenes fares very much better than those who pick the chestnuts out of the fire. The blind man nosed out the likely cribs to crack and for this service he claimed a substantial part of the swag. Thus he became a fence and later one who financed his thieves. Eugen Bast had money, a banking account, and a safe holding the soundest foreign currencies.

  He became a great man, did Eugen Bast. He became even greater. Once, when the boys had brought him a packet of letters instead of the expected securities, he stormed about the blunder and as a penalty reduced their share very considerably. Later he made Eva read these letters out to him. He lay on the bed and digested his meal, and made her kneel by the bed on a brush and read aloud. In that way he received all the pleasure he could wish.

  Letters up till then had meant very little to Eugen; it was beyond his comprehension what one person could have to write to another on several sheets of paper. However, one gets as old as a cow an
d has still something to learn. Eugen Bast now understood that it was highly uplifting to listen like this to a She writing to a He on four pages.

  She started every letter ecstatically, stupid with love and longing. But on the second page one came across piquant recollections, honeyed indelicacies – the lady knew how to get a gentleman going all right! Eugen Bast, who had never seen her, felt his own blood warmed by her active eroticism.

  He made Eva read on until she fell off her brush. Smoking cigarettes, he lay thinking far into the night. It was uplifting reading, no doubt, but Eugen with his shrewd brain soon grasped that very much more could be made out of such letters …

  They were very expensive English chairs that Eugen Bast had been given to mend, made with a particular brown cane, which he had to order especially for this commission. And it was a very careless householder who, thinking the blind are blind and wishing to give an advance for the purchase of the cane, had fetched out a banknote from a safe concealed by wallpaper. Though blind men cannot see, their hearing is all the better for it, and the gentleman would have been very surprised to know that Eugen Bast could describe the position of his small safe to within an inch or two. Judged by the chairs and safe, the man was well-to-do; he was also married, with children. And from the letters, which the boys had brought along instead of securities, it had been easy to guess that she too was prosperous and married.

  It was a brilliant business for a blind man – something which ran itself. The boys took care of the letters, without any idea of how much they were worth (it was funny, but almost every third money box contained such a letter). Then Eva made the first gentle hints, and the poor blind beggar merely made the offers, just played the messenger: ‘I’ve a packet here for Herr Lehmann – you know who I mean!’

  Oh, how Eugen Bast now blossomed forth! He, by the way, hadn’t called himself Bast for a long time; he was Walter Schmidt or Hermann Schultze, with excellent papers, a man blinded in the war, a man in receipt of a pension; everything in good order, police officer! Yes, he flourished. He wallowed in his own evil. He had plenty of time to think out his letters, his blackmailing letters, and how to torment these men and women, leaving them no peace, extorting money by means of their adulterous correspondence – a lot of money with his dark threats, pleas and lies.

  He would never get another woman like Eva. Without question, without complaint, without resistance, she did what he commanded. She would never betray him. During all those years she had never freed herself from his spell for one moment, and now she was unable to discuss anything with another person, for he locked her in the flat when he went out; she had nothing to think of but him. He was indeed never out of her mind, any more than was that taunt, daily harped on for three years in every variation of reproach, complaint, sneer and threat, the taunt that she had made him blind and ugly, that she had to pay for it, that she could never pay for it …

  But even the most cunning old lag can come a cropper. Let him calculate never so shrewdly and think he has taken every factor into consideration, yet, in the moment he is quite unsuspecting, life calculates differently and trips him up. And when Eugen Bast came a cropper it was quite by accident, without the police having the slightest notion who he was, without any of his rather numerous crimes being the cause of his downfall – he came a cropper in a completely unexpected way, from a change of lodgings. Life itself betrayed him.

  And this change was not even his own. Mazeike the landlord at last won his case before the Tenant and Rent Agreement Office against the chronically non-paying Dörnbrack, upon which the Welfare Bureau allotted some sort of army hut to the Dörnbracks and their former flat became empty.

  Eugen Bast knew nothing of all this. He did not know his landlord, nor the Dörnbracks, nor the new tenant, a certain Querkuleit. And yet it was Querkuleit who tripped him up.

  Bast lived in one of those huge East End tenement buildings which seem to consist of thousands of flats; he found it convenient. In this overcrowded human beehive Bast was lost to sight, lived unnoticed. He was the blind beggar. People had seen him in the Friedrichstrasse; he had a young lad to guide him there and back, and was said to live with a woman but no one had seen her – possibly she looked uglier than he did. Finished and done with, labelled and put away – there were so many tragedies in that building. Children were born and beaten, women had their fights, one day one man was drunk, another ill the next day. It was one of the poorest blocks. It was no pleasant place (except from Eugen Bast’s point of view); it was a house similar to many in that time of misery and the newly married Querkuleits would certainly have preferred a pleasanter one had there been any empty flats elsewhere. As it was Querkuleit, a young clerk in the Municipal Housing Bureau, had not missed the chance of the Dörnbracks’ flat, for which he could not be blamed seeing that he was on the waiting list, had a little influence and no choice.

  So these two young people settled down in the overcrowded tenement, in love with one another (even such things existed during this curious, nightmare year of 1923) and anxious to have a life of their own, which was difficult, for the house encroached on them; where Eugen Bast passed without making any comment, Frau Querkuleit would say: ‘Well, my little chap, what are you howling for?’ And in about three months young Querkuleit had involved himself in at least six feuds arising out of the lavatory, the dustbins, the wash-house, Frau Schmidt calling Frau Schultze a bitch, and himself mentioning to Frau Dobrin that there was always such a smell from the Müllers’ flat. In short, the Querkuleits were innocent young people who thought one ought not to make other people’s lives more difficult than they were already, seeing which the whole house set out to make life for the Querkuleits just as difficult as was possible.

  But the Querkuleits were young. Things would have to go very hard indeed with them before they yielded.

  Bitterly they fought for justice and decency in a world where injustice and cheating were victorious. Nor had they enough with their six feuds. Frau Querkuleit, who as a woman should have been the more practical of the two, said again and again: ‘Listen, she’s crying’ – ‘Do you hear? He’s beating her’ – ‘Wake up, she’s just fallen down. Now she’s shouting!’

  Querkuleit was always dead-tired in the evenings and fell into a sound sleep at once but his wife was rather a light sleeper and she soon became very worried by the noises in the flat below. Night after night she woke up to hear a woman weeping and moaning; once she heard a shriek and thought to distinguish the sound of blows. However, she never heard a man’s voice, which had to be part of all the noise, and that was particularly strange. So she awakened her Querkuleit and he had to listen too. Happy herself, it was a flaw in her happiness to know that another woman was so wretched. At first Querkuleit grew impatient at being aroused from sound sleep to listen to a woman weeping – even a man fond of justice loves his sleep – but as time went on his fighting spirit awoke too.

  No one, his wife pointed out, had ever heard a sound from the man, not a word, no curses, no shouts of his, only ever the woman. That was odd. It was not difficult to find out who lived in the flat below – a blind, disfigured man who went out begging and repaired cane chairs, a man to be pitied perhaps. Dumb? No, he wasn’t dumb. Querkuleit had heard him speak a few words to the boy who guided him. Dumbness wasn’t the explanation of his silence.

  Another odd thing – by night only the woman was heard, by day only the man was seen. The Querkuleits watched. They questioned the neighbours. No, the woman was never to be seen. Nobody could describe her.

  ‘It’s mysterious,’ said Frau Querkuleit.

  ‘I must clear it up,’ said Querkuleit.

  Oh, what fancies one can spin in such tenements of a thousand destinies when one is still young and life is new! When one still believes one has a place to occupy in the world, when one is not yet reconciled to this universe of contradictions – when one still retains a hint of that mysterious darkness whence we come. Day after day the Querkuleits looked at the scarred and l
eathery mask of the blind man, and listened night after night to the weeping and moaning.

  They were humble people; they knew that women were frequently beaten by their men, a thing they considered base and vulgar yet not inhuman – but there was something about the blind beggar which was inhuman. They discussed it a great deal but it remained nonetheless inhuman. And what was inhuman had to be changed … In the end Querkuleit went to the police station and spoke out his doubts.

  The officer in charge shook his head, however. ‘Let me tell you, young man, the police don’t like making fools of themselves. A woman who’s ill-treated at night but who makes no attempt to get in touch with the world outside – that’s too much!’

  ‘But …’ Querkuleit turned red.

  ‘Well?’ said the police officer amicably. ‘Perhaps he keeps her chained up all day! So that she can’t even knock on the wall! No, no. You’ve too much imagination.’ He looked at the card in the file. ‘And anyway, they’ve been registered there for over three years. They may be living in sin, but it’s a long time since we did anything about that.’

  ‘But can’t one …’ began Querkuleit despairingly.

  ‘Of course you can. And you will learn, young man. There’s a good proverb: don’t meddle with what doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘And it’s a cowardly proverb,’ said the indignant Querkuleit. ‘If we’re only to concern ourselves with our own troubles the world would be in a fine way.’

  ‘Looks pretty fine now, what?’ The police officer surveyed the young zealot benevolently. Then he became official. ‘We regret to be unable to take action.’ He gave another glance at the young man. ‘Of course if you could report that the woman had asked for help …’

  Very thoughtfully Querkuleit went home. To his wife he defended the police officer, but she was far from satisfied. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the police have to see somebody lying dead before they do a thing. They make things easy for themselves.’

  ‘Well, don’t wake me up any more,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s quite futile and I need my sleep. The quarrels at the housing office will soon be unbearable.’