Wolf Among Wolves

  He had stood with bent head at the window. Taking his trembling hand between hers, she felt how young he was, how young in enthusiasm and despair, young and without any sense of responsibility.

  “You’ll bring it off,” she said softly. “But when you do, I shan’t be with you.”

  He pulled away his hand. “You’ll stay with me,” he said coldly. “I forget nothing.” And she knew then that he was thinking of his mother, who had once slapped her face; she hadn’t wanted to stay with him because of that. But now she would be staying with him forever. He hadn’t yet succeeded indeed, and she had known for a long time that he was not going the right way about it. But what did it matter? Though there could still be this dirty room and she couldn’t know from one day to another what they were going to live on, or whether they could have any clothes or furniture—from one o’clock this morning she would be tied to him.

  She reached out for her stockings and began to slip them on.

  Suddenly she was seized by a terrible anxiety. Everything might have gone wrong yesterday, utterly wrong; the last 1,000-mark note lost. But she dared not to get up to make sure. With burning eyes she looked at Wolfgang’s clothes hanging over the chair near the door, trying to guess the amount of money in them by the bulge in his right-hand coat pocket.

  The fees have to be paid, she thought anxiously. If the fees aren’t paid it can’t happen.

  It was fruitless, this study. Sometimes he kept his handkerchief in that pocket. Perhaps new notes had been issued—500,000-mark notes, 1,000,000-mark notes. And what would a civil marriage cost? One million? Two million? Five million? How could she know? Even if she had been brave enough to reach into the pocket and count, she would still know nothing! She never knew anything.

  The pocket was not bulging enough.

  Slowly, so that the bed springs did not creak, cautiously, anxiously, she turned to him.

  “Good morning, Peter,” he said in a cheerful voice. His arm pulled her to his breast, and she put her mouth against his mouth. She did not want to hear what he said.

  “I’m entirely broke, Peter. We haven’t a single mark left.”

  In the silence that followed the fires of love grew brighter. The stale air of the room was purified by a white-hot flame. In spite of everything, merciful arms raise lovers from the struggle, the hunger and despair, the sin and wickedness, into the clean cool heaven of consummation.

  Chapter Two

  Berlin Slumps

  I

  Many streets round Schlesische Bahnhof are sinister. In 1923, to the dreariness of the facades, the evil smells, the misery of that barren stone desert, there was added a widespread shamelessness, the child of despair or indifference, lechery born of the itch to heighten a sense of living in a world which, in a mad rush, was carrying everyone toward an obscure fate.

  Rittmeister von Prackwitz, in an over-elegant light-gray suit made to measure by a London tailor, looked almost too conspicuous with his lean figure, snow-white hair above a deeply tanned face, dark bushy eyebrows and bright eyes. He walked with fastidiously upright carriage, careful not to come into contact with others, his gaze directed to an imaginary point far down the street, so that he need not see anything or anybody. He would have liked to transport his hearing also, to, say, the rustling harvest-ripe cornfields in Neulohe, where reaping had scarcely started; he had tried not to listen to scorn and envy and greed calling after him.

  It was as if he were back in the unhappy days of November 1918, when he and twenty comrades—the remainder of his squadron—went marching down a Berlin street in the neighborhood of the Reichstag and suddenly, from window, roof and dark entry, bullets had pelted down on the small party; an irregular, wild, cowardly sniping. They had marched on then as he now did, chin pushed out, lips compressed, staring at an imaginary point at the end of the street, a point they would possibly never reach.

  The Rittmeister had the feeling that, in the five years of lunacy which followed, he had in reality always been marching on like this, eyes fixed on an imaginary point, waking as well as sleeping—because there was no sleeping without dreams during those years. Always a desolate street full of enmity, hatred, baseness, vulgarity; and if against all expectation one came to a turning, there opened up only another similar street, with the same hate and the same vulgarity. But there again was that point which had no real existence and was a mere figment of the imagination. Or was that point something which did not exist outside, but within himself, in his very own chest—let him be frank: in his heart? And perhaps he marched on because a man must, without listening to hate and vulgarity, even though from a thousand windows ten thousand evil eyes are watching him, even though he is quite alone—for where were his comrades? Perhaps he marched on because only thus could a man fulfill himself and become what he had to be in this world—himself.

  Here in Langestrasse near Schlesische Bahnhof in Berlin, accursed city, Rittmeister von Prackwitz was haunted by the sensation that, although confronted by ten blatant coffee-house signs advertising nothing but brothels, the goal of his march was at hand. He, who much against his will had come here to hunt up at least sixty laborers for the harvest, could soon lower his eyes, stand at ease and feel with the Lord God: “Behold, it was very good.”

  Aye, a good, almost a bumper harvest stood in the fields, a harvest which those famished townspeople could very well do with, and he had had to leave it all in the charge of his bailiff, a somewhat dissipated young fellow, and go up to town to bed laborers. It was strange and utterly incomprehensible that the greater the misery in the city, the scarcer the food, and the more the country offered at least a sufficiency, the more people made for the city like moths attracted by a deadly flame.

  The Rittmeister burst into a laugh. Yes, indeed, it really looked as if the heavenly rest after the sixth day of creation was near at hand. Or was it a fata Morgana, a mirage of an oasis, seen when thirst became unbearable?

  The female in whose face he had unthinkingly laughed emptied behind him a pailful, a barrelful, nay, a whole vatful of filthy abuse. The Rittmeister, however, turned into a shop over which hung a dilapidated signboard with the words: “Berlin Harvesters’ Agency.”

  II

  The flame rises up and sinks; it is extinguished; happy the hearth that retains the glow. The glow dies down, but there is still warmth.

  Wolfgang Pagel sat at the table in his field-gray tunic, now extremely worn and old. His hands rested on the bare oilcloth covering. “Madam Po has scented it,” he whispered, winking and nodding at the door.

  “What?” asked Petra. “You’re not going to call Frau Thumann Madam Po, or she will throw us out,” she added.

  “That’s certain,” he said. “There won’t be any breakfast today. She’s scented it.”

  “Shall I ask her, Wolf?”

  “Don’t bother. He who asks won’t get. Let’s wait.”

  Wolgang tilted the chair, rocked back and started to whistle: Arise, ye prisoners of starvation.… He was quite unconcerned, unworried. Through the window—the curtain was now drawn—a gleam of sun entered the dreary gray room, or what is called sun in Berlin; all the light which the smoke-blanket lets through. As he rocked to and fro the sun lit up sometimes his wavy hair, sometimes his face with its sparkling gray-green eyes.

  Petra, who had on only his shabby summer overcoat dating from pre-war times, looked at him. She was never tired of looking; she admired him. It was a wonder how he managed to wash in a little hand-basin with less than a pint of water and still look as if he scrubbed himself for an hour in a bath. She felt old and used up compared with him, although she was actually a year younger.

  Abruptly he stopped whistling and listened to the door. “The enemy approaches. Will there be any coffee? I’m frightfully hungry.”

  Petra would have liked to tell him that she, too, had been hungry a long time, for the scanty breakfast with its two rolls had been her only food for days—but no, she didn’t want to tell him that.

&n
bsp; The shuffling footsteps in the corridor died away, the outer door slammed. “You see, Peter, Madam Po has merely taken herself to the toilet again. That’s also a sign of the time; all business is transacting in a circuitous manner. Madam Po runs around with her pot.”

  He again tilted back the chair, starting to whistle unconcernedly, gaily.

  He did not deceive her. She could not understand by a long way all he said, nor did she listen very attentively, even. She was alive to the sound of his voice, its softest vibration, of which he himself was hardly aware; and she could tell that he was not feeling so gay as he would like to appear, nor so unconcerned. If only he would unburden himself; in whom should he confide if not in her? There was no need to feel embarrassed, he did not need to tell her lies, she understood him—well, perhaps not altogether. But she approved of everything in advance and blindly. Forgave everything. Everything? Nonsense, there was nothing to forgive, and even should he start to race at her or to strike her, well, it would have its reason.

  Petra Ledig was an illegitimate child, without a father; a little salesgirl later, just tolerated by her now-married mother as long as she handed over her salary to the last halfpenny. But there came a day when her mother said: “With this rubbish you can buy your own food,” and shouted after her: “And where you sleep, that’s your own affair also.”

  Petra Ledig (it may be assumed that the pretentious name of Petra was her unknown father’s sole contribution to her equipment for life) was, at twenty-two, no longer a blank page. She had ripened, not in a peaceful atmosphere, but during the war, postwar and inflation. Only too soon she knew what it meant when a gentleman customer in her boot shop touched her lap significantly with his toe. Sometimes she nodded, met this one or that of an evening, after shop hours, and courageously steered her little ship a whole year without floundering. She even managed to pick and choose to a certain extent, her choice being decided not so much by her taste as by her fear of disease. But when the dollar rose too cruelly and all that she had put by for the rent was devalued to almost nothing, then she would parade the streets, in deadly fear of the vice squad. She had made the acquaintance of Wolfgang Pagel during such a stroll.

  Wolfgang had had a good evening. He had a little money, he had been drinking a little. At such times he was always cheerful and ready for anything. “Come along, little dark thing, come along!” he had shouted across the street, and something like a race took place between Petra and a mustachioed policeman. But a taxi, a frightful contraption, had carried her off to an evening quite pleasant but really not very different from any other evening.

  The morning had come, the gray, desolate morning in the room of an accommodation hotel, which always had such a depressing effect. The sort of occasion when you ask yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Why do I go on living?” As was proper, she had feigned sleep while the gentleman hurriedly dressed, quietly, so as not to wake her. For conversations on the morning after were unpopular and distressing, because you discovered that you had nothing to say to the other person and, more often than not, loathed him. All she had to do was to look through her eyelashes to see whether he put the money for her on the bedside table. Well, he had put the money down. Everything was going as usual, not a word of another meeting, and he was already at the door.

  She did not know how it happened or what had come over her, but she sat up in bed and asked in a low and faltering voice: “Would you—would you, sir—oh, may I come with you?”

  At first he had not understood and had turned round quite startled. “Excuse me?”

  Then he had thought that she, perhaps new to such a situation, was ashamed to pass the proprietress and the porter. He had declared that he was willing to wait for her if she made haste. But while she hurriedly dressed, it appeared that it was not a question so simple as that of leaving, unmolested, the house for the street. She was used to that. (She had made no pretenses from the first moment.) No, she wanted to stay with him altogether. Wouldn’t it be possible? “Oh, please, please!”

  Who knows what he was thinking? He was no longer in a hurry, though. He stood there in the gloomy room—it was just that horrible hour, shortly before five in the morning, which gentlemen always choose for leaving, for then they can catch the first streetcar to their lodgings and freshen themselves up before their work; and many pretend to, or actually do, have a nap, so as to leave the bed disturbed.

  He drummed with his fingers thoughtfully on the table. With greenish eyes shining out from beneath his lowered brow, he looked contemplatively at her. Did she think he had any money?

  No. She hadn’t thought of that. It would be all the same to her.

  He was a second lieutenant in the war, and without a pension. Without a job. Without a fixed income. In fact, without any income.

  It was all right. That wasn’t her reason for asking.

  He did not inquire why she had asked. Indeed, he did not ask any more questions, anything at all. Only later did it strike her that he might have asked a lot of questions, very disagreeable questions. For instance, whether she made a habit of begging men to let her go with them; whether she was expecting a baby; thousands of disgusting things. But he stood there and looked at her. Already she was convinced that he would say “yes.” Ought to. Something very mysterious had urged her to ask him. She had never thought of such a thing before, nor was she at that time the least in love with him. It had been quite an ordinary night.

  “ ‘Oh, Constance, is it done?’ ” said he, quoting the title of a popular comedy hit. For the first time she noticed the humorous wrinkles round his eyes, and that he winked when he joked.

  “Oh, certainly,” she rejoined.

  “All right,” he said, drawling the words. “What is hardly enough for one is barely sufficient for two. Come along. Are you ready?”

  It was a strange sensation, descending the stairs of a repulsive bed-and-breakfast house by the side of a man to whom one now belonged. When she stumbled over a badly laid stair carpet, he had said “Upsey” quite absent-mindedly. Probably he did not realize she was with him.

  Suddenly he had stopped. She remembered it vividly. They were downstairs in the false marble splendor and stucco of the entrance. “By the way, my name is Wolfgang Pagel,” he said with a slight bow.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she replied in the correct manner. “Mine is Petra Ledig.”

  “Whether you’ll be pleased I don’t know,” he had laughed. “Come on, little one. I shall call you Peter. Petra is too Biblical and too stony. But your surname’s good enough for me and can stay as it is.”

  III

  Petra was still too much taken up with what was happening to pay much attention to the sense of Wolfgang’s words. Later she learned from him that Petra meant “rock,” and that it had first been borne by the disciple Peter, on whom Christ had founded his church.

  Altogether she learned a good deal during the year she lived with him. Not that he behaved like a teacher. But it was inevitable that, during the long hours of their being together—for he was without a genuine occupation—he should talk a good deal with her, if only because they could not always sit in silence side by side in their dreary room. And when Petra gained confidence, she often asked a question, either to stop him brooding or because it gave her pleasure to hear him talk. For instance: “Wolf, how do they make cheese?” or: “Wolf, is it true that there is a man in the moon?”

  He never laughed at her, nor did he ever refuse to answer her questions. He replied slowly and carefully, for the knowledge he had gained at the military college was of no great consequence. And where he was not informed, he took her with him and they went into one of the big libraries and he consulted their volumes. She would sit quietly, some little book in front of her, which, however, she did not read, and look about her awestruck at the big room in which people were sitting so still, so gently turning the pages, as quietly as if they were moving in their sleep. It always seemed like a fairy tale that she, a little shopgirl, an ille
gitimate child, who had just been on the point of going under, was now able to enter buildings where educated people, who had surely never heard of the rottenness with which she had been forced to make such an intimate acquaintance, were sitting. By herself she would never have dared to come, although certain poor creatures allowed to sit along the walls showed that not only wisdom was being sought here, but also warmth, light, and just that which she, too, sensed in these books—a profound peace.

  When Wolfgang had learned enough, they went out and he told her what he had gleaned. She listened and forgot it, or remembered it but not accurately—that, however, was of no importance. What mattered was that he took her seriously, that she was something other than a creature whom he liked and who was good for him.

  Sometimes, when she had spoken without thinking, she would exclaim, overwhelmed by her ignorance: “Oh, Wolf, I’m so terribly stupid. I’ll never learn anything. I shall remain stupid forever.”

  Even then he did not laugh at the outburst, but entered into her feelings in a friendly and serious spirit, declaring that fundamentally it was unimportant whether one knew how cheese was made or not. For one would never know how to make it as well as the cheesemaker did. Stupidity, he believed, was something quite different. If one didn’t know how to arrange one’s life, how to learn from one’s mistakes, but got annoyed, repeatedly and unnecessarily, about little things, knowing that they would be forgotten in a fortnight; if one could not get on with one’s fellowmen—that was stupidity, real stupidity. His mother was a striking example. In spite of all her reading and her experience and intelligence, she had succeeded, out of sheer love, through knowing what was best for him and tying him to her apron string, in driving her son out of the house, he who was really patient and easy to get on with. (So he said.) She, Petra, stupid? Well, they hadn’t quarreled yet, and even if they had no money, they hadn’t spoiled their lives on that account, nor sulked. Stupid? What did she mean?