Authors: Ernst Haffner
Back to HQ, to his cell. Now it’s only a matter of time before Ludwig is shipped back to H.
9
IT’S A LOVELY FEELING
to lie on a Baltic or Wannsee beach and trickle sun-warmed sand over your naked belly. But on a winter’s night, to have only clammy cold sand as pillow, mattress and blanket, is so shocking that even a youth habituated to misery, and escaped from an institution, finds it impossible to linger in such a bed. All the more so when the escapee’s name is Willi Kludas and he’s just got over a night of terror from Cologne to Berlin. Without having slept a wink, he climbs out of the coffin on Kronprinzen Ufer at 4 a.m. Stands there, doubled over with cold like a gouty old man. There’s the River Spree, oily and black, Lehrter Bahnhof, the Lessing Theatre. Nowhere a trace of any human activity.
He remembers that the Central Market on Alexanderplatz takes on casual labor at this hour of the morning. Maybe he’ll be able to earn a few pfennigs there.
The luxury street Unter den Linden is open to the most desperate of vagabonds, he is even allowed to pass through the central archway of the Brandenburg Gate, if it suits him, the one that was once reserved for the Kaiser. The republic made it possible. No more restrictions. We are all citizens, all enjoy the same rights.
Outside the entrances to the market, the lads are standing around in thick bunches, hoping to be taken on by a trader for an hour or two. The chances are getting slimmer all the time. The traders don’t splash their silver around the way they used to. They do the work themselves, they’d rather save their money. Not paying any attention to his fellows, Willi Kludas stands around, not quite believing that he’ll be able to land a job. A woman trader calls from the hall: “Helper … over here!” Willi plunges towards her, the whole pack pursuing him. They cluster round the trader. Voices from the pack are raised in menace: “Wot’s he doing here, then? He’s not from here … taking away our work …” An elbow catches Willi in the ribs. “Get lost, you! ’Spect you’ve forgotten what it’s like, getting a beating?” They shove Willi out of the way. At first, they are successful. Willi is swallowed up in the crowd, the trader has already chosen her man. The horde is still working Willi towards the exit. He is seized by a mad fury. He jumps at one of the youths, and knocks him over. The whole pack howls with fury. Two boys run to the aid of their fellow. Willi lashes out blindly. He can feel blood spurting from his nose. Who cares. His fists smash into the faces of his assailants. The whole despair of the past few nights is discharged in a wild bout of fury.
Suddenly a commotion goes through the watching pack. All of them, including Willi’s foes, flee through the hall towards another exit. Willi stands there, panting and wiping his bloodied face. Why have they stopped? Then he sees two market policemen approaching. Damn! Let’s get out of here! The nearest stall, with its piles of baskets and boxes, obscures him from the gaze of the police. If they nab you here, you
can kiss goodbye to your freedom, Willi my lad. He runs and runs. The well-fed police have long since given up the chase. Willi cleans himself up in the toilets of Alexanderplatz station. The blows, his blood, have made him a little crazy. For a couple of pieces of bread he would knock a man to the floor, if he didn’t hand over the bread, say.
It’s light. The few who have not yet joined the ranks of the six million starving hurry to their places of work. Don’t be late! The boss could be in a bad mood. The businesses, the department stores, throw open their premises, filled to bursting with wares for sale. The staff pull up the shutters outside the window displays; everything looks so seductively wonderful, the watchers feel their mouths watering. But a watering mouth won’t satisfy you, just looking won’t satisfy you, the smell of food wafting out onto the street won’t satisfy you! All that will just enrage the hungry man, make him wilder with the desire to stuff his belly with the excess of the others! Suddenly Willi Kludas is standing in a food emporium. He can’t remember how he came to be there. He is standing in front of a glazed construction of sausages and roasts, cheeses and sides of ham, appetizingly arrayed salads and fish. The sales assistant is talking to him. Willi wants … A loaf of bread. Yes, start off with a loaf of bread, a whole loaf. Then butter, a quarter-pound, here, and some sausage. Some ham. A tin of Halberstadt sausages, a tin of sardines … The sales assistant slices, spatchels the yellow butter into a neat cube, and proceeds to decorate it with one or two slashes.
Willi returns to his senses. What’s come over him? These things he’s ordering will come to at least five marks. He hasn’t got any money! Not a sausage. He calls out to the sales assistant: “Forgot my wallet … back in a jiffy!” and he runs
off up the road. Hurries through the endless streets, the gray proletarian streets. With him his hunger, which is getting more and more urgent. Before long, Willi stops in front of another food shop, stares at the displays till everything goes misty before his eyes. Should he go in and beg? Slowly, step by step, he enters a bakery. He’s still in the doorway when the rosy-cheeked salesgirl’s voice greets him: “There’s no charity here!” They can tell from the look of you, Willi, that you don’t have ten pfennigs for rolls.
He crosses the street and marches into a creamery. He is the only customer. At the counter, handily within reach, is a pile of cheap sausage.
Special today, 88 pfg. per pound.
Willi asks for half a pound of butter. The sales assistant turns to the butter tub. Willi grabs a ring of sausage, sucks in his stomach, stuffs the sausage down his trousers, and runs out of the shop. Doesn’t hear the cries of the sales assistant, tears round the corner, crosses the road, turns another corner, flies through a labyrinth of streets. Finally he dares to look round. No one is coming after him. No one is watching him. He walks on, the stolen sausage nestling against his empty stomach. On impulse, he jumps up onto a passing bus. When the conductor makes his rounds, Willi jumps off again. Now he can take the chance to eat his sausage.
He gets it out in a doorway. It weighs something in the region of two pounds. That would mean you’ve stolen sausage to the value of 1.76 marks, Willi! Enough with the thinking now. With his bare hands he tears the sausage in two. He sinks his teeth into meat and fat, chews and grinds the claggy mass. He closes his eyes in animal bliss, snuffling and grunting. A lower-middle-class family of four would make a sausage like that last a week. But a robber, a thief, someone
who doesn’t need to work for the money, he can get through all two pounds in one go … With his belly half full he begins to feel a little anxious about the consequences of the action he perpetrated in a daze of hunger. Already Willi is back to prowling the streets again, wondering where his next meal is coming from. Will he steal something else now? No, never! He’d sooner die, sooner hand himself over to the next policeman. Where will he sleep? One sleepless night hanging under an express, the next one in a sandbox … he can’t go to a homeless shelter. They ask you for papers. And a hostel charges at least fifty pfennigs a night. He needs fifty pfennigs, that would sort everything out. Then he can turn in somewhere, and after a night’s sleep, things won’t look quite so hopeless.
Fifty pfennigs. All right. If only he had something he could sell. His anorak? Maybe a Jew would give him fifty pfennigs for it. But now, with the onset of winter, no jacket, no coat? And another night in the open? A third sleepless night? No, there’s no two ways about it, he’s selling his coat. Please God someone will take it. The first dealer he sees thinks it’s a bit worn. “Try selling it to an unemployed, in the warming hall,” the trader suggests. “What warming hall?” asks Willi. “Well, here, the one on the corner of Ackerstrasse and Elsässer Strasse, in the old tram depot, you can’t miss it.”
Is there anywhere as bleak as the shelter in the disused tram depot? The clock in the yard tells you all you need to know: for years now it’s been stuck at fourteen minutes past one. It hasn’t changed from the way it was when the last freezing derelict left it a year ago: grisly in its accumulated filth, its lack of hygiene. Even in the mornings, the place is overcrowded. Beside the entrance there are two or three roughly carpentered benches and tables. At a coffee stall, you can get
a pot of coffee for five pfennigs, and two dry rolls for five more. Blind never-washed windows; dust spins up from the stone-flagged floor. Perfect for the tubercular homeless seeking warmth. A short walk to the actual warming hall itself. It’s true, it is warm there. Warm to high heaven! The reek of hundreds of unwashed bodies, worn filthy clothes and clouds of cheap tobacco, all stewing in the heat.
The hall is painted in the favorite colors of Berlin welfare organizations: gray-green distemper, with dark-green gloss. Scraped, worn, rubbed away and dirtied by thousands of recumbent backs. A little infirm daylight peeks through the dusty skylight. Placed at intervals in the hall, three or four glowing stoves, long pipes convecting their warmth all over. Along the walls and banked in the center of the room, leaving aisles at either side, bench after bench. A couple of tacky doors lead to the women’s day room and the toilets. That’s all. Not the least bit of decoration, not the cheapest splash of color in the welfare gray-green. Everywhere dirt, grime, rubbish. Signs of years of use, signs of barely masked dilapidation. And in the midst of this desperate lack of cheer, the want of hygiene boosted to thirty centigrade, enjoying this gift from the city of Berlin to its most wretched citizens: hundreds of men and boys. They sit or lie on the benches. They are so tightly packed, you have to row with both arms to get through.
Along the walls are big inscriptions:
Trading Forbidden: No Exceptions.
The aisles are a trading floor, nothing else goes on there but dealing in old clothes. It’s a rag market, a bazaar of cast-offs. Every single one of these paupers is set on selling or swapping something with one of the other paupers. Possible things, impossible things, things new and old, are
on offer: shoes, socks, shirts, trousers, collars and ties, separate trousers and waistcoats and entire suits, summer coats, winter coats, tunics, ladies’ and men’s shoes and linens. Tattered books and cheap cigarettes, ghastly sweets and cadged bread. Everything, everything. Not even the human body is off-limits. In the toilets, young fellows offer themselves for twenty pfennigs or a few cigarettes. On the window side that looks out onto the roofed-in yard, a group of men are sitting deliberately away from all the commotion. There are no young men among them. Men of forty and much older. They are all busy doing something. One is sitting there in his oft-patched underwear, jabbing at his trousers with a needle. In fact, several of these men are sewing clothes. An old fellow, bent from long decades of work, is trying to get his clobbered boots into shape. With moving patience, he drills holes in the uppers with a pair of scissors, and sews them up with piano wire. Here people are endlessly playing cards, there they are doing crossword puzzles. There’s even a volatile debating society in one corner.
In the aisles, the traders push and jostle. One shouts out: “A weskit, perfect nick, thirty-five pfennigs!” An interested party stops in front of him. Where is the waistcoat? The trader is still wearing it. The buyer walks round the wearer, scrutinizes the waistcoat, finds fault with this and that, and offers twenty-five pfennigs and three cigarettes. The deal goes through. The seller takes off the waistcoat, and buttons up his jacket when he puts it on again. A boy does something similar with his decent shoes. He pulls them off and swaps them for a pair in much worse state and a mark in money. No one is in any way surprised at the exchange. Everyone sees the point of it: a mark means a loaf of bread, and half a pound
of marge. Even banking deals are transacted in the warming hall. Someone needs a mark. Someone else is prepared to lend it. As collateral he takes the debtor’s unemployment card. The next dole day, tomorrow, they agree to meet in the payments room of the welfare department, and the creditor will keep the debtor in view until he’s got his mark back, plus the agreed fifty pfennigs interest.
In the anteroom Willi Kludas takes off his anorak, walks into the day room, and mingles with the traders in the aisle. For a few minutes he takes in how the others go about it, then he calls into the babel of voices: “One anorak, in perfect state, hardly worn, one mark!” “One mark for a perfect anorak, one mark, save the price of a coat!” After twenty-odd minutes he’s involved in a tough haggle with an interested party. Willi wants his ten groschen, the buyer only wants to pay nine. Furious at so much recalcitrance, the young man slips the jacket on. Unhappily, it’s a good fit. “Well?” “One mark,” Willi says implacably. A moment ago he’d have been content with half that. “Well, take your mark, you stubborn get!” Rarely can one mark have been the object of such endlessly happy contemplation. He presses the coin into his palm and stuffs his fist in his trouser pocket. One mark! Fifty pfennigs for kip, twenty pfennigs for ten ciggies? Yes! Ten pfennigs for old leftover rolls? Yes! Which leaves twenty pfennigs for tomorrow. He gets the cigarettes right away from a fellow-trader. Ten for twenty. Throat scratchers, but they produce smoke, taste of tobacco, and make a man content.
The baker on Ackerstrasse, used to custom from the warming hall, hands out eight old rolls and a couple of squashed pieces of cake for his ten pfennigs. “Thank you, sir,” says a blissful Willi. My god, cake! It makes no difference to your
stomach if it’s a bit squashed or perfectly preserved. Willi decides to throw down another five pfennigs. At the coffee stall in the shelter, he buys a pot of hot milky coffee. He’s had nothing warm since Cologne. Methodically, quite the epicurean, he sits down with a blissful smile at the dirty table, and begins by skimming sausage skins, fag ends and paper scraps onto the ground. Cake demands respect, demands a clean table. He sets down the misshapen, but still tasty, lumps in front of him. They’re for last. Dessert. First off, four of the rolls. While his teeth are grinding away at the tough rolls, Willi remembers the stolen sausage. The dough swells in his mouth. Why didn’t he think of selling his anorak right away? Then he wouldn’t have had to steal. The girl will have got the shock of her life. And now presumably she has to make good the loss out of her own wages …