Every Man Dies Alone (33 page)

But of course he doesn’t go. Of course he allows himself to be persuaded to stay. She will think about everything, sort it all out. And his banishment to the sofa, of course he gets that commuted too. He is allowed to return to her bed. Enwrapped in her motherly warmth, he soon falls asleep, this time without any more crying.

She, however, remains awake a long time. Actually, she stays awake all night. She listens to his breathing, it is lovely to listen to
a man’s breathing again, to have him close in bed. She was alone for such a long time. Now she once again has someone she can look after. Her life is no longer void of content and purpose. Oh, yes, it’s quite possible that she’ll have more trouble from him than is good for her. But trouble like that, trouble from a man one cherishes, that is good trouble.

Hetty resolves to be strong enough for two. Hetty resolves to keep him safe from the threat of the Gestapo. Hetty resolves to educate him, to make a real human being out of him. Hetty resolves to free her Hänschen—but no, that’s not his name, his name is Enno—any-way Hetty resolves to free her Enno from the shackles of that other woman, the Nazi. Hetty resolves to bring order and cleanliness to this life now lying at her side.

And Hetty has no idea that this feeble man at her side will be strong enough to plunge her life into disorder, grief, self-reproach, tears, and danger. Hetty has no idea that all her strength was nullified the moment she decided to keep Enno Kluge in her house and to protect him against all the world. Hetty has no idea that she has put herself, and the whole little world she has built up, into terrible danger.

Chapter 26

FEAR AND TERROR

Two weeks have passed since that night. Hetty and Enno Kluge have each learned much about the other, living together in close proximity. As the man couldn’t leave the house for fear of the Gestapo, they lived as if on an island, the two of them alone. They couldn’t avoid each other, or refresh themselves by seeing other people. They were strictly dependent on one another.

During the first few days, she hadn’t even allowed Enno to help out in the shop—those first few days, she was never completely sure there wasn’t some Gestapo agent crawling outside. She had told him to stay in the house. He mustn’t let anyone see him. She was a little surprised at how calmly he accepted this instruction; to her it would have been ghastly to find herself condemned to such inactivity. But Enno had simply said: “That’s fine, I can occupy myself!”

“But what will you do, Enno?” she had asked. “It’s a long day, and I won’t be able to see to you much, and mooching around won’t make you rich.”

“Do?” he had asked in surprise. “How do you mean? Oh, you mean work?” He had it on the tip of his tongue to say he thought he had done enough work to last him a lifetime, but he was still a little wary of her, and so he said instead, “Of course I wish I could work. But what can I do in the parlor? Now, if you had a lathe here!” And he laughed.

“I know what you can do! Look at this, Enno!”

She carried in a big box, full of all different types of seeds. Then she put a board down in front of him, the kind of wooden counting board with a milled edge that used to be found on many shop counters. And she picked up a fountain pen with a nib stuck upside down. Using it as a shovel, she started to separate a handful of seeds she had spilled on the counter into their different varieties. Quickly and deftly, the pen went here and there, separated some out, pushed them into a corner, sorted others, and she explained, “These are all leftover feed grains, swept out of various corners and from burst sacks. I’ve collected them for years. Now that feed is getting so scarce, I’m glad I did. I’m sorting it…”

“What are you doing that for? It’s incredibly laborious! Why not give it to the birds straight, and let them sort it!”

“And spoil three-quarters of it! Or else have them eat feed that doesn’t agree with them, and die on me! No, it’s just a little job that needs doing. I did it myself in the evenings, and on Sundays, whenever I had a bit of spare time. Once on a Sunday, I sorted through five pounds, as well as doing my housework! That’s still my record. Now we’ll see if you can beat it or not! You’ve got a lot of time on your hands, and it’s good meditative work. I’m sure you have a lot of things you want to meditate about. Give it a go, Enno!”

She gave him the little shovel, and watched as he began to work.

“Why, you’re quite dexterous!” she praised him. “You have clever hands!”

And then, a moment later: “But you need to pay closer attention, Hänschen—I mean Enno! I can’t quite get used to it. You see, this pointy, shiny seed is millet, and this dull, black, round one is rapeseed. You mustn’t get them mixed up. It’s best to pick the sunflower seeds out with your fingers beforehand, it’s quicker than with the pen. Wait, I’ll bring you some bowls that you can put the grains in when you’ve sorted them!”

She was full of eagerness to find him work for his boring days. Then the shop bell rang for the first time, and from that moment there was an unbroken stream of customers, and she was only able to look in on him for moments at a time. Then she would find him dreaming over his counting board full of seeds. Or else, and worse, she would find him creeping back to his workplace, alerted by the sound of the door, like a guilty child caught playing hooky.

She soon saw that he would never break her record of five pounds—he couldn’t even manage two pounds. And even those she would have to go through afterward herself, so messy had been his work.

She was a little disappointed, but she agreed when he said: “Not quite satisfied, Hetty, are you?” He laughed sheepishly. “But you know, it’s not real man’s work. Give me some proper man’s work, and just watch me light into it!”

Of course he was right, and the next day she didn’t put the board with the seeds in front of him. “You poor man, you’ll just have to get through the day by yourself!” she said comfortingly. “It must be awful for you. But maybe you’d like to read? I’ve got a lot of books of my late husband’s in the bookcase over there. Wait, I’ll open it for you.”

He stood behind her as she scanned the shelves. “He was an official in the Communist Party. That copy of Marx I just managed to save during a search. I had hidden it in the stove, and an SA man was about to look there when I offered him a cigarette, and he forgot.” She looked him straight in the eye. “But maybe this isn’t your sort of reading matter, darling? I must admit, I’ve barely looked at them since my husband’s death. Perhaps that was mistaken of me—every-one ought to be interested in politics. If we all had been, then maybe the Nazis wouldn’t have got their hands on power; that’s what my Walter always said. But I’m just a woman…”

She broke off, realizing he wasn’t listening.

“Down at the bottom there are a couple of novels that I like.”

“What I like is a proper thriller, you know, with criminals and murder, that sort of thing,” proclaimed Enno.

“I don’t think I have anything like that. But this is a lovely book, I’ve read it many times. Wilhelm Raabe’s
Sparrow Street
. Why don’t you try that, I’m sure it’ll cheer you up…”

But when she came into the parlor by and by, she didn’t see him reading it. It lay open on the table, and later she found it pushed to the side.

“Aren’t you enjoying it?”

“Ach, you know, not really… They’re all such terribly good people, and I get bored. It’s too much like a proper book. Not a book that a man can sink his teeth into. I’m looking for something with a bit more excitement, you know.”

“Too bad,” she said. “Too bad.” And she put the book back on the shelf.

It bothered her when she walked into the parlor now, to see the man sitting there, always in the same slumped posture and staring into space. Or else he would be asleep, with his head on the table. Or standing by the window, looking into the courtyard, always whistling the same tune. It bothered her. She had always been an active
woman, and she still was. A life without work would have struck her as pointless. What made her happiest was having the whole shop full of customers—she would have liked to divide herself up into ten little Hetties to serve them all.

And now this man here, standing, sitting, squatting, lying, for ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, doing nothing, absolutely nothing! He was stealing God’s sweet time! What was the matter with him? He slept well, he ate with a healthy appetite, he wanted for nothing, but he refused to work! Once her patience snapped, and she said irritably: “If only you wouldn’t always whistle that same tune, Enno! It’s six or eight hours now you’ve been whistling:
Bedtime now for little girls…”

He laughed sheepishly. “Does my whistling bother you? Well, I know some other tunes. Shall I whistle the Horst Wessel song instead?”
^*
And he began:
Raise high the flag! The ranks in strict formation
…

Without a word she went back to the shop. This time she wasn’t just annoyed with him, she was seriously offended.

It passed. She didn’t bear grudges, and besides, he too had noticed that he had overstepped the mark, and so he surprised her by fixing the lamp over the bed. Yes, he could do things like that too; if it suited him, he was deft enough, but usually it didn’t suit him.

The period of his banishment to the parlor soon came to an end. Hetty convinced herself that there were no spies prowling around outside, and Enno was permitted to help out in the shop again. He still wasn’t allowed out on the street, as there was always a chance he might run into someone who knew him. But helping out in the shop was all right, and he turned out to be useful and deft. She noticed that working for long periods at some repetitive task tired him out, so she took care to offer him plenty of variety.

Before long she allowed him to help with the customers. He was good with them: polite, confident, even witty in his slightly sleepy way.

“That gentleman is an asset to your business, Frau Haberle,” old customers would say. “Must be a relation?”

“Yes, he’s a cousin of mine,” lied Hetty, happy about the praise for Enno.

One day she said to him, “Enno, I want to go out to Dahlem today. You remember, Herr Lobe is having to close his pet shop there because he’s been called up. I have an opportunity to buy some of his stock. He has a lot, and it would be a big help to us, because things are in shorter and shorter supply. Do you think you can manage the shop on your own?”

“Of course I can, Hetty, of course I can! Easy. How long are you going to be gone for?”

“Well, I’ll set off right after lunch, but I don’t think I’ll be back before the end of the day. I’d like to see my dressmaker at the same time…”

“Why not, Hetty? As far as I’m concerned, you can be away till midnight. Don’t worry about the shop, I can handle everything here.”

He walked her to the subway. It was during the lunch break, and the shop was closed.

She smiled to herself as the train moved off. Living with someone else was such a completely different proposition! It was fun working together. Only then did you really have a feeling of achievement at the end of the day. And he was trying as hard as he could to please her. He did his best. No, he wasn’t an energetic or even a hard working man, she had to admit that. When he had been made to run around too much for his liking, he often withdrew to the parlor, regardless of how full the shop was, and she had to serve the customers by herself. Once, after calling him many times, she found him in the cellar, perched on the rim of the sandbox, half asleep, the little sand pail half filled in front of him—and she waiting for it for the past ten minutes!

He’d jumped when she called out: “Enno! What’s keeping you? I’m waiting and waiting!”

Like a frightened schoolboy he’d got to his feet. “Just dropped off a bit,” he murmured sheepishly, and started scooping up sand. “Just coming, boss, won’t happen again.”

Little jokes like that were his way of appeasing her.

No, not a mighty worker before the Lord, our Enno, that was certainly clear to her, but he did what he could. And then he was likable, polite, decent, affectionate, without obvious vices. She forgave him his excessive consumption of cigarettes. She wasn’t averse to smoking the odd one herself, when she was tired…

But that day Hetty was unlucky with her errands. Lobe’s store in Dahlem was closed when she got there, and no one was able to tell her when he might be back. No, he hadn’t yet been called up, but he probably had things to do in connection with the army. Normally, the shop opened at ten in the morning—perhaps she might try tomorrow?

She said thank you, and went to see her dressmaker. But when she reached the premises, she stopped in bewilderment. The house had been bombed overnight; there was nothing but rubble. People hurried past it, some purposely averting their eyes, unwilling to see the devastation or afraid of being unable to conceal their anger. Others went by especially slowly (the police saw to it that no one stopped), either with expressions of curiosity or else frowning at the destruction.

Yes, Berlin was being sent down to bomb cellars more and more often, and more and more bombs were falling on it, among them the feared phosphorus canister bombs. More and more people now quoted Göring’s saying that his name would be Meier if an enemy plane showed its face over Berlin. The night before, Hetty had sat in her bomb shelter—alone, because she didn’t want Enno to be seen as her official boyfriend and housemate. She had heard the nerve-racking sound of planes, like mosquitoes droning and whining. She hadn’t heard any bombs falling: thus far her part of the city had been spared. People told each other the British didn’t want to hurt working people, they just wanted to bomb the rich people out west…