A Stranger in My Own Country (9 page)

I won't dwell on the details of how my wife's eyes were gradually opened to the guile of the Sponars, how she came to see more clearly with each passing day how the fearful prospect of an impoverished old age had turned our landlords into heartless criminals. Most of her news came via a little old lady who delivered newspapers and bread, who had taken pity on the lonely and heavily pregnant woman. Isolated though our house was, it was the object of close scrutiny in the village. People there knew a lot – and suspected more than they knew.

On the evening when I had put what I thought was a very generous proposal to the Sponars, namely to provide for them in old age in return for their consent to the auction sale, they hadn't taken time to ‘think things over', as they had said to me, but had gone straight to their friend, the building contractor and local Party branch leader Gröschke, to seek his advice. I can't say much about this man from my own observation, I only saw him the one time, much later, a slimly built man with a curiously small head and a hard face. Like many small skilled tradesmen during the worst years of unemployment he had declared himself bankrupt, probably not because of his own incompetence, but either because of the general hardship of the times or because of his Party commitments – or else for a combination of all three reasons. Anyway, he'd been declared bankrupt, and it's not hard to imagine what a wretched life such a little man would have led as a bankrupt in a village of hard-nosed farming folk who placed a high value on money and property. But now the Führer had come to power, and with him tens of thousands of these bankrupted little men had seized their own opportunity, determined to get their share of power and property. Overnight they had acquired the power of life and death over their fellow men, or if not that, then at least the power of making them or breaking them: and if they themselves had been harshly treated in the past, they were determined to treat their fellow citizens much more harshly now.

So what kind of advice was such a man going to give his good friend Sponar, when the latter explained his and my situation to him? He knew this friend was living on a pitiful pension from social services, in a house that could be taken away from him at any time. The conversation will doubtless have gone something like this: ‘The man is a writer and he's not a Party member, and we know from the jokes he was told by his Jewish visitor that he is no friend to the Party. We could have him put away for that alone. But that isn't going to help us much, in six months or a year he'll be out again, and we'll be right back where we started. No: what we need to do is charge him with something serious and conduct a house search – we'll probably find something. But even if we don't, it doesn't really matter; we'll lock him up anyway on the serious charge, and since he won't be questioned he won't be able to talk his way out of it either. Best of all, of course, is if he tries to make a run for it. Then we'll be rid of him for good, one way or the other.

But of course we won't do anything until he has bought up the mortgages and has effectively become the owner of the house. You'll agree to his proposals, but not give your consent to the foreclosure. I know these city types, they can't wait, things can't go fast enough for them, and he'll buy on the strength of your word alone. So then he'll be the owner, and safely out of the way, and we'll have no trouble with the wife. She can't put the house up for auction without your consent, and we'll make her life there a misery – leave that to me. But we won't let her move out until she has paid rent for the longest possible time, and definitely not before she has paid out the allowance that has been promised you and your wife for the rest of your lives. And I can guarantee, Sponar, that you and your wife are going to live to a ripe old age!' That's more or less what the hard-boiled old bruiser, leathery veteran of many a brawl at political meetings, will have said: not all at once, of course, but one little plan will have led on to another, until the whole villainous scheme had been cooked up to perfection. All three of them will have appeased their consciences by arguing that I was an enemy of the Party, and over the next ten years this neat little excuse was used to justify so much brutality in Germany that the trick they planned to
pull on me was just a minor thing by comparison, quite benign and harmless.

My wife only learned of all this in dribs and drabs, noticing something when she was with the Sponars, or picking up on something said by her delivery lady. It's a good thing the whole business didn't just drop on her all at once, like a cold downpour; it might well have proved too much for her. The body can habituate itself to the most potent poisons, it's just a matter of increasing the dosage gradually. Meanwhile the days passed, one after another, the sentry was still posted out in the street, another stood guard at the back down by the river, and nothing happened. If she had only known where I was she would have tried earlier to escape from this prison, but she knew nothing. (The good doctor had not been able to get a message to her, of course – that's why the sentry was there.) In the end it was the old lady who told her they were saying in the village that I was in the nick in nearby Fürstenwalde. No sooner had my wife received this tip-off than she made up her mind. She waited until the late evening, after supper, when it was getting dark. Then, in order to throw the evil Sponars off the scent, she turned the taps full on to fill the bath noisily and turned up the volume on the radio, got our sleeping boy out of bed and dressed him. Holding him in her arms and leaving everything else behind, she slipped out into the garden in her stockinged feet, put on her shoes and crept along to the garden gate. She had already observed, especially at night, that the sentries, while still in place, were so tired after their long hours on duty that they relaxed their guard somewhat, often wandering a long way up and down the street. So she waited for such a moment, when the SA man was eighty or a hundred paces away, crossed the street and disappeared into the dark forest of thin pine trees, where she walked on through the night, with no path to follow. The hardest thing to cope with was the child in her arms, who had picked up on her agitation, wouldn't go to sleep, and kept on asking questions. In the end she managed to calm him down (and herself too, therefore) by telling him little stories in a low voice. She pressed on through the dark, trackless forest, bumping into unseen
branches, stumbling over roots, sometimes falling over: but always she was driven on by her single-minded resolve. She wasn't far from the railway station, but she was frightened to go there. She had reached the point where she thought our enemies capable of anything. Perhaps they had sent her description through to the station, a description that was easy enough to recognize: a tall, heavily pregnant woman. So she carried on feeling her way through the forest, further and further, until she had left the village behind her. Then she struck out for the road, found it, and carried on along it, finding the going a little easier now. It was the same road that I had travelled a few weeks earlier in the ‘jalopy'. She also passed the spot that I'll never forget as long as I live, where I was supposed to get out and where I had to fight for my life. I had seen it in the sunshine, and will always see it bathed in sunshine, with the thin poles of the scrawny pine trees. She walked past the place at night, it meant nothing to her, and her heart did not beat any faster on that account. It's a strange planet we live on, and those who are closest to each other still live a long way apart.

It's not that far from our village to the town of Fürstenwalde, not much more than ten kilometres, but for a heavily pregnant woman with a three-year-old child in her arms it is a very long way indeed. For weeks on end she had just been sitting in the house and getting no exercise: now she had to step out and keep on going. Sometimes the boy would run along beside her for a bit, and then she would sit down on a milestone and rest for a while. She was also thinking about the two babies she carried inside her, of course, and told herself that all this agitation, worry and over-exertion couldn't possibly be good for them. But it didn't help at all. And it didn't help at all that every kilometre felt like a mile, and that her feet hurt terribly from all the extra weight she was carrying. Nor did it help that she was fretting and worrying about me and about what the future would bring for us. But she was driven on by sheer willpower, and she travelled the road that she had to travel; rough or smooth, she had no choice. The night was all around her, perchance the stars were up above her head, and a wind helped her on her way. But as she was walking she also thought about the
people whose actions had brought her to this, having to creep around in secret at night like some tramp. She thought about the men who had seized control in Germany, destroying at a stroke the freedom of the individual in every area of personal life, inviting every kind of arbitrary abuse and putting people at each other's throats. But it helped her to think like that. It taught this kind, forgiving heart how to hate, it made these eyes, which otherwise only ever looked for the good in life, clearsighted, and not once in the ten years that followed, not for one second, did she ever falter in her hatred. She knew these men are evil, and want only what is evil. It may be that here and there along the way they do something good, but since they want what is evil, it doesn't count, and their downfall is certain. What is acquired by evil means cannot stand. And now hopefully the hour is nigh when the whole evil edifice will collapse in ruins!

She reached Fürstenwalde, by then it was already morning, and she went to the railway station. She used the washroom to freshen up herself and the child, and had a bit of breakfast. Then they went to visit me, she saw me again, healthy and in good spirits, and both of us felt our hearts a little lighter. As for what to do next, the only word of advice I could give her was: ‘Go and see Rowohlt, good old Rowohlt – he'll know of a way out!'

And so she went to see him, the man who stood by his authors when they were in any kind of trouble, and he knew what to do. ‘You must always go straight to the top', said Rowohlt, and telephoned a high-profile lawyer,
⁴⁸
a man who had defended the Reichstag arsonist on the authority of the Party, who in the end was executed himself. They arranged a meeting: the famous lawyer, the famous publisher Rowohlt, and the writer's wife. The wife was rather indignant when she realized that the lawyer, a man of the utmost coarseness and an old Party member, found nothing remotely surprising about her story; to him it was just another run-of-the-mill case. Instead the lawyer cheerily assured her: ‘You've come to the right man, dear lady! The district council leader of Lebus is an old school friend of mine. We'll take a car and scoot straight over there, and I'll bet you anything: in half an hour
I'll get your husband released!' This completely unexpected prospect of my early release banished all my wife's indignation at his blasé acceptance of such a blatant injustice. She gladly climbed into a car with the lawyer, waved goodbye to the publisher, and off they went. What the lawyer and the district council leader talked about in private, regarding conspiracies against the person of the Führer, good and bad political jokes, and Mr von Salomon, we shall never know. We are and always have been entirely unpolitical people, and this kind of thing is a closed book to us. At any rate, the lawyer came hurrying into the anteroom where my wife had been waiting with pounding heart, pressed a sheet of paper into her hand and said: ‘Take the car and drive like the wind to Fürstenwalde! This is an order for your husband's immediate release, but it's Saturday today, and after twelve noon no German courthouse jail will release a prisoner until the Monday! So if you get a move on you might just make it!' And make it she did: at five to twelve she got the decrepit-looking clerk of the court to stop chewing his pen and stir his stumps, and by five past twelve we were standing out on the street together again – and oh so happy!

The first thing we did, of course, was to drive to Berlin to my publisher and thank him for his splendid intervention. Then we went for a celebratory dinner (we viewed my release as a definitive victory over our enemies!), collected our son and went home – for my part, I must admit, with a heart full of feelings of triumph and revenge.

It was still light when we got back to our village. From the railway station we walked along the narrow path through the forest to our house. The sentry in the street had gone, but Mr Sponar happened to be standing in the garden, and he just stared at the three of us, stared and stared . . . We walked past without a word and went upstairs to our apartment. Oh, if only I had been a little more worldly-wise and diplomatic, I would have done nothing now and just left Sponar and his friend Gröschke to fret and stew, safe in the knowledge that I had the district council leader's release order in my pocket. In time everything would have settled down again, I would have acted as though I knew nothing about the treachery of the Sponars, somehow or other I would
have got rid of these dangerous enemies and so would have quietly and gradually come into possession of the villa.

But I just couldn't wait, I couldn't hold my tongue, I had to charge at it like a bull at a gate! I sat down at my typewriter and hammered out a letter to Mr Sponar: ‘Dear Mr Sponar, 1. I hereby give you notice that I am terminating your tenancy. 2. I hereby withdraw my offer of such and such a date giving you rights of residence and a lifetime annuity. 3. . . . 4. . . .' The list went on, as I exacted my revenge by numbers. I sealed the letter, put it downstairs on the hall table, and climbed into the bathtub, where I bathed my body in hot water and my soul in hot feelings of revenge.

And what did it all get me? A second visit from the SA! Next morning, when we had barely finished our breakfast, they turned up again. This time there were only three of them, accompanied by a leader I hadn't seen before, who was not wearing quite so much gold braid; but still, there they were, and just as determined as their predecessors to do whatever it took. I pointed to my release order, and to my civic right to terminate agreements: but to no avail. He told me I had tried to exploit the plight of a fellow German national in order to gain a personal advantage. That contravened a basic Nazi principle, and for that alone he could place me under arrest again forthwith. I had no right, he said, to deprive old Mr Sponar of his villa just because I had loads of money. Either I must agree immediately to withdraw the letter and fulfil all the obligations I had entered into earlier – or else! And he made a dramatic gesture to underline his meaning. And, he added, this time they would make sure I ended up in a place where even the most wily lawyer would not be able to get me out!