Every Man Dies Alone (32 page)

But Enno Kluge had decided he would go to Lotte first and pick up his things. He would show up at Hetty’s with a suitcase: that way he would see whether she really loved him, and he would prove to her that he wanted to be done with his old life.

He was lucky with Lotte. She wasn’t at home, and he hurriedly packed a few belongings in his case. He even resisted the temptation to go through her things—no, this time everything would be different. It wasn’t going to be provisional, like last time, when he moved into the tiny hotel room. No, this time it was going to be the beginning of a new life—so long as Hetty took him in.

As he approached the shop, he walked more and more slowly. He kept putting down his suitcase, though it wasn’t that heavy. He kept wiping his brow, though it wasn’t that hot.

Then he was standing in front of the shop and peering in through the shiny silver bars of the birdcages—yes, there was Hetty. She was waiting on customers; four or five people were in the shop. He joined them and watched with pride and a trembling heart how skilfully she served them, how polite she was with them.

“We no longer carry Indian millet, madam. India is part of the British Empire. But I have Bulgarian millet, which is much better.”

And in the middle of helping customers, she said, “Oh, Herr Enno, it is nice of you to have come to help out. Leave your suitcase in the parlor. And then will you fetch me some bird litter from the basement. And I need cat litter as well. And ants’ eggs…”

And while he was chasing up and down the stairs with these and other orders, he thought, She saw me right away, and she saw that I had a suitcase with me as well. The fact that I was told to put it in the parlor was a good sign. But I’m sure she’ll ask me a lot of questions first; she’s very persnickety about everything. I’ll have to tell her some story or other.

And this man of fifty or so, this habitual drifter, idler, and womanizer began to pray like a schoolboy: Please, God, let me be lucky once more in this life, just this once more! I promise to turn over a new leaf, only please let Hetty take me in!

So he prayed. And he wished also that the hours till closing time might stretch and stretch, to postpone their comprehensive discussion and his confession, because he would have to confess something to Hetty, that was clear. How else was he going to explain to her why he had come to her with everything he had in the world—though that was little enough! He had always tried to play the big man to her in the past.

And then, quite suddenly, it was time. The shop had been closed for an hour and a half—that was how long it took to feed and water all its denizens and to tidy up at the end of the day. Now the two of them were sitting facing each other across the round coffee table,
having eaten and chatted a little, always timidly avoiding the main subject between them, when suddenly the shapeless, blowsy woman had raised her head and said: “Well, Hänschen? What is it? What’s happened?”

No sooner had she spoken the words in a concerned, almost maternal tone, than Enno’s tears began to flow. First slowly, then more and more copiously they streamed down his bony, colorless face, making his nose appear more and more pinched.

He moaned, “Oh, Hetty! I can’t go on! It’s too awful! The Gestapo pulled me in…”

And, sobbing loudly, he buried his head in her large motherly bosom.

At those words, Frau Hetty Haberle raised her head. Her eyes acquired a hard gleam, her neck stiffened, and she almost gabbled back: “What did they want with you?”

Little Enno Kluge had—by luck or inspiration—hit upon exactly the right word. None of the other stories with which he could have come to her for love or sympathy would have benefited him as much as the single word
Gestapo
. Because the widow Hetty Haberle hated disorder, and she would never have taken a dissolute drifter and time waster into her house or her motherly embrace. But the one word
Gestapo
opened all the doors of her soft heart: anyone pursued by the Gestapo could depend on her sympathy and her help.

Her first husband, a minor Communist Party official, had been put in a camp by the Gestapo as early as 1934, and that was the last she had seen or heard of him, aside from a parcel containing his torn and dirty effects. On top of it was a death certificate, issued by the Registry Office in Oranienburg, stating cause of death: pneumonia. Later on, she had heard from other inmates who had been released what “pneumonia” was used to mean in Oranienburg and the nearby concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.

And now she had in her arms another man, a man she had thus far taken for a shy, affectionate, love-starved creature, all of which commended him to her, and it turned out that he too was being followed by the Gestapo.

“There now, Hänschen!” she said soothingly. “You can tell me all about it. If someone is wanted by the Gestapo, there’s nothing I won’t do for him!”

Those words were music to his ears, and he didn’t even have to be Enno Kluge, with all his experience of women, to make the most of his chance. What he now brought out, amidst sobs and tears, was a
curious mixture of fact and fiction: he even managed to work in his maltreatment at the hands of the SS man Persicke as part of his latest tribulations.

Whatever implausibility the story might have was glossed over by Hetty Haberle in her hatred of the Gestapo. Already her love was weaving a splendid aura round the ne’er-do-well at her breast, and she said: “So you signed the statement and thus concealed the identity of the culprit, Hänschen. That was very brave of you. I don’t think one man in ten would have it in him to do that. But you know, if they do catch you, you’ll be in for it, because with that statement hanging over you, you’ll always be in danger.”

Already half comforted, he said, “Oh, if you stand by me, they’ll never find me!”

But she shook her head quietly and worried. “I don’t really understand why they let you go at all.” Suddenly the horrifying thought came to her: “Oh my God, what if they shadowed you, so that you would lead them to someone else?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Hetty. I first had to go to—somewhere else, to pick up my things. I would have noticed if someone had been following me. Anyway, why did they let me go at all? They could just as easily have kept me locked up.”

But she had already thought of this. “They think you know the author of the postcards and will lead them to him. Maybe you really do know him, too, and you did drop the card, as they say you did. I don’t want to know, I don’t want you ever to tell me!” She leaned down over him and whispered: “I’m going to go out now for half an hour, Hänschen, and take a peek outside, to see if there isn’t a spy hiding somewhere. And you, you’ll stay here quietly by yourself?”

He told her there was no point in going out looking: he was positive that no one had followed him.

But she was haunted by the terrible memory of the time they had once before dragged a man out of her flat, and out of her life. Her anxiety wouldn’t permit it, she had to go out and check.

And while she walks slowly round the block—for company she has taken the adorable Scotch terrier Blackie out of her shop, with him her evening walk looks completely innocent—while she strolls up and down, apparently intent on the dog, but aiming her alert eyes and ears everywhere—in that time Enno undertakes a cautious first inventory of her parlor. It can only be fleeting, and anyway most of her drawers are locked. But even this first inspection is enough to tell him that never in his life has he been with a woman like this, a woman
with a bank account and even a checkbook, with all the checks printed with her name!

And again Enno Kluge resolves to turn over a new leaf, and always behave properly in this flat, and never take anything that she doesn’t freely give him of her own accord.

She comes back and says, “No, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But it’s possible they did see you come in here, and they will be back tomorrow morning. I’ll set the alarm for six and have another look around then.”

“You don’t have to do that, Hetty,” he says. “I’m sure no one followed me.”

She makes up a bed for him on the sofa, then goes to bed herself. But she leaves the door open between the two rooms, and so she hears him tossing and turning, hears his groans and cries and how restless he is when he finally does sleep. Then, just after she’s dropped off herself, she’s wakened up again by the sound of him crying. He’s crying again, asleep or awake. Hetty can see his face clearly before her in the dark, his face that for all his fifty years still has something childlike about it—perhaps it’s the weak chin, or the full, crimson mouth.

For a while she listens to him crying and crying in the quiet of the night, as though it was the night itself, mourning the sorrow of the world.

Then Frau Heberle makes up her mind, and gets up and gropes her way to the sofa in the dark.

“Don’t cry, Hänschen! You’re safe with me. Hetty will help you…”

She comforts him, and when he still won’t stop crying, she leans down over him, pushes her arm under his, and leads the crying man to her bed, where she takes him in her arms and holds him to her bosom…

An aging woman, an older man needy as a child, a little comfort, a little passion, a small aura round her beloved’s head—and it never occurs to Fräulein Hetty to wonder how this weepy, feeble creature could possibly be the fighter and hero of her imaginings.

“But now everything’s all right, isn’t it, Hänschen?”

But no, the question causes the briefly stanched stream of tears to flow again, and he shakes in her embrace.

“What’s the matter, Hänschen? Is there anything else worrying you that you haven’t told me about yet?”

This, now, is the moment the old lady killer has been working toward for the past several hours, because he has concluded that in the
long run it is too dangerous and perhaps even impossible to leave her in the dark about his marriage and his real name. He is in confessional mode, all right. He will confess this as well, she will take it, and not love him any the less. She’ll hardly throw him out on the street now, moments after she’s taken him in her arms for the first time!

She has asked Hänschen whether there was anything else worrying him that he hasn’t told her about. Now, racked, crying, he admits that his name isn’t Hans Enno at all, but Enno Kluge, and that he is a married man with two grown-up sons. Yes, he is a wretch who wanted to lie to her and deceive her, but now that she’s been so good to him, he can’t bring himself to do that.

As always, his confession is only a partial confession, a little truth mixed with plenty of fiction. He sketches the portrait of his wife, a tough, evil Nazi working in the post office, who won’t keep her husband because he refuses to join the Party. This woman forced her older son to join the SS—and he tells her about Karlemann’s atrocities. He paints the picture of an unequal and bad marriage, the quiet, patient, long-suffering husband and the wicked, ambitious Nazi wife. They can’t live together, they are bound to hate one another. And now she has thrown him out of their joint apartment! He lied to his beloved Hetty, because he loves her so much, and because he didn’t want to cause her any pain!

But now he has confessed everything. No, he won’t cry any more. He will get up and pack his things and leave her—go out into the cruel, cruel world. He will find somewhere to hide away from the Gestapo, and if they catch up with him, well, that won’t really matter, either, now that he has lost the love of Hetty, the only woman he has ever really loved in his life!

Yes, he’s quite a wily seducer, is Enno Kluge. He knows what buttons to press with women: loving and lying are all one. There just needs to be a little grain of truth, she needs to be able to credit a bit of the stuff he tells her, and above all, tears need to be at the ready, and helplessness…

On this occasion, Hetty listens to his confession with absolute horror. Why did he lie to her in the first place? When they met, he had no reason to tell such lies! Did he already have such designs on her then? They can only have been wicked designs, if they necessitated such lies as that.

Her instinct tells her to send him packing, a man who is capable of deceiving a woman from the very start will always be ready to lie to her later on. And she cannot share her life with a liar. She led a
clean and honest life with her first husband, and the few stories she heard about him after his death, well, an experienced woman can only laugh at such things.

No, she would send him packing from her very arms—if it weren’t tantamount to sending him into the arms of the enemy, the hated Gestapo. Because she is firmly convinced that this is what would happen if she did indeed send him away. The story of his persecution by the Gestapo she believes implicitly. It doesn’t even occur to her to question its veracity, even though she has just learned that the man is a liar.

And then the matter of the wife… It’s not possible that everything he said about the woman is untrue. No one can imagine something like that, there must be some truth in it. She thinks she knows the man lying at her side, a weak creature, a child, someone with good in him: it would only take a few friendly words to lead him. But that woman, tough, ambitious, a Nazi trying to make her way up through the Party ranks—of course a man like him wouldn’t suit her, a man who refused even to join her beloved Party, a man who hated the Party, perhaps secretly was even trying to work against it!

Could she send him back to such a wife? Into the arms of the Gestapo?

She couldn’t, and she won’t.

The light clicks on. He is standing at her bedside, wearing a too short blue undershirt, tears silently pouring down his pale cheeks. He bends down to her and whispers, “Farewell, Hetty! You were too kind to me. I don’t deserve it, I am a bad person. Farewell! I am going now…”

She holds him back. She whispers, “No, you’re staying with me. I gave you my promise, and I keep my promises. Don’t say anything. Go back to the sofa now, and try to get some sleep. I will think about what’s best to do.”

Slowly, sadly, he shakes his head. “Hetty, you’re too good for me. I will do everything you tell me, but in all truth, Hetty, it’s better that you let me go.”