Iron Gustav (58 page)

He made Eva read on until she fell off her brush. Smoking cigarettes, he lay thinking far into the night. It was uplifting reading, no doubt, but Eugen with his shrewd brain soon grasped that very much more could be made out of such letters …

They were very expensive English chairs that Eugen Bast had been given to mend, made with a particular brown cane, which he had to order especially for this commission. And it was a very careless householder who, thinking the blind are blind and wishing to give an advance for the purchase of the cane, had fetched out a banknote from a safe concealed by wallpaper. Though blind men cannot see, their hearing is all the better for it, and the gentleman would have been very surprised to know that Eugen Bast could describe the position of his small safe to within an inch or two. Judged by the chairs and safe, the man was well-to-do; he was also married, with
children. And from the letters, which the boys had brought along instead of securities, it had been easy to guess that she too was prosperous and married.

It was a brilliant business for a blind man – something which ran itself. The boys took care of the letters, without any idea of how much they were worth (it was funny, but almost every third money box contained such a letter). Then Eva made the first gentle hints, and the poor blind beggar merely made the offers, just played the messenger: ‘I've a packet here for Herr Lehmann – you know who I mean!'

Oh, how Eugen Bast now blossomed forth! He, by the way, hadn't called himself Bast for a long time; he was Walter Schmidt or Hermann Schultze, with excellent papers, a man blinded in the war, a man in receipt of a pension; everything in good order, police officer! Yes, he flourished. He wallowed in his own evil. He had plenty of time to think out his letters, his blackmailing letters, and how to torment these men and women, leaving them no peace, extorting money by means of their adulterous correspondence – a lot of money with his dark threats, pleas and lies.

He would never get another woman like Eva. Without question, without complaint, without resistance, she did what he commanded. She would never betray him. During all those years she had never freed herself from his spell for one moment, and now she was unable to discuss anything with another person, for he locked her in the flat when he went out; she had nothing to think of but him. He was indeed never out of her mind, any more than was that taunt, daily harped on for three years in every variation of reproach, complaint, sneer and threat, the taunt that she had made him blind and ugly, that she had to pay for it, that she could never pay for it …

But even the most cunning old lag can come a cropper. Let him calculate never so shrewdly and think he has taken every factor into consideration, yet, in the moment he is quite unsuspecting, life calculates differently and trips him up. And when Eugen Bast came a cropper it was quite by accident, without the police having the slightest notion who he was, without any of his rather numerous crimes being the cause of his downfall – he came a cropper in a completely unexpected way, from a change of lodgings. Life itself betrayed him.

And
this change was not even his own. Mazeike the landlord at last won his case before the Tenant and Rent Agreement Office against the chronically non-paying Dörnbrack, upon which the Welfare Bureau allotted some sort of army hut to the Dörnbracks and their former flat became empty.

Eugen Bast knew nothing of all this. He did not know his landlord, nor the Dörnbracks, nor the new tenant, a certain Querkuleit. And yet it was Querkuleit who tripped him up.

Bast lived in one of those huge East End tenement buildings which seem to consist of thousands of flats; he found it convenient. In this overcrowded human beehive Bast was lost to sight, lived unnoticed. He was the blind beggar. People had seen him in the Friedrichstrasse; he had a young lad to guide him there and back, and was said to live with a woman but no one had seen her – possibly she looked uglier than he did. Finished and done with, labelled and put away – there were so many tragedies in that building. Children were born and beaten, women had their fights, one day one man was drunk, another ill the next day. It was one of the poorest blocks. It was no pleasant place (except from Eugen Bast's point of view); it was a house similar to many in that time of misery and the newly married Querkuleits would certainly have preferred a pleasanter one had there been any empty flats elsewhere. As it was Querkuleit, a young clerk in the Municipal Housing Bureau, had not missed the chance of the Dörnbracks' flat, for which he could not be blamed seeing that he was on the waiting list, had a little influence and no choice.

So these two young people settled down in the overcrowded tenement, in love with one another (even such things existed during this curious, nightmare year of 1923) and anxious to have a life of their own, which was difficult, for the house encroached on them; where Eugen Bast passed without making any comment, Frau Querkuleit would say: ‘Well, my little chap, what are you howling for?' And in about three months young Querkuleit had involved himself in at least six feuds arising out of the lavatory, the dustbins, the wash-house, Frau Schmidt calling Frau Schultze a bitch, and himself mentioning to Frau Dobrin that there was always such a smell from the Müllers' flat. In short, the Querkuleits were innocent young
people who thought one ought not to make other people's lives more difficult than they were already, seeing which the whole house set out to make life for the Querkuleits just as difficult as was possible.

But the Querkuleits were young. Things would have to go very hard indeed with them before they yielded.

Bitterly they fought for justice and decency in a world where injustice and cheating were victorious. Nor had they enough with their six feuds. Frau Querkuleit, who as a woman should have been the more practical of the two, said again and again: ‘Listen, she's crying' – ‘Do you hear? He's beating her' – ‘Wake up, she's just fallen down. Now she's shouting!'

Querkuleit was always dead-tired in the evenings and fell into a sound sleep at once but his wife was rather a light sleeper and she soon became very worried by the noises in the flat below. Night after night she woke up to hear a woman weeping and moaning; once she heard a shriek and thought to distinguish the sound of blows. However, she never heard a man's voice, which had to be part of all the noise, and that was particularly strange. So she awakened her Querkuleit and he had to listen too. Happy herself, it was a flaw in her happiness to know that another woman was so wretched. At first Querkuleit grew impatient at being aroused from sound sleep to listen to a woman weeping – even a man fond of justice loves his sleep – but as time went on his fighting spirit awoke too.

No one, his wife pointed out, had ever heard a sound from the man, not a word, no curses, no shouts of his, only ever the woman. That was odd. It was not difficult to find out who lived in the flat below – a blind, disfigured man who went out begging and repaired cane chairs, a man to be pitied perhaps. Dumb? No, he wasn't dumb. Querkuleit had heard him speak a few words to the boy who guided him. Dumbness wasn't the explanation of his silence.

Another odd thing – by night only the woman was heard, by day only the man was seen. The Querkuleits watched. They questioned the neighbours. No, the woman was never to be seen. Nobody could describe her.

‘It's mysterious,' said Frau Querkuleit.

‘I must clear it up,' said Querkuleit.

Oh, what fancies one can spin in such tenements of a thousand
destinies when one is still young and life is new! When one still believes one has a place to occupy in the world, when one is not yet reconciled to this universe of contradictions – when one still retains a hint of that mysterious darkness whence we come. Day after day the Querkuleits looked at the scarred and leathery mask of the blind man, and listened night after night to the weeping and moaning.

They were humble people; they knew that women were frequently beaten by their men, a thing they considered base and vulgar yet not inhuman – but there was something about the blind beggar which was inhuman. They discussed it a great deal but it remained nonetheless inhuman. And what was inhuman had to be changed … In the end Querkuleit went to the police station and spoke out his doubts.

The officer in charge shook his head, however. ‘Let me tell you, young man, the police don't like making fools of themselves. A woman who's ill-treated at night but who makes no attempt to get in touch with the world outside – that's too much!'

‘But …' Querkuleit turned red.

‘Well?' said the police officer amicably. ‘Perhaps he keeps her chained up all day! So that she can't even knock on the wall! No, no. You've too much imagination.' He looked at the card in the file. ‘And anyway, they've been registered there for over three years. They may be living in sin, but it's a long time since we did anything about that.'

‘But can't one …' began Querkuleit despairingly.

‘Of course you can. And you will learn, young man. There's a good proverb: don't meddle with what doesn't concern you.'

‘And it's a cowardly proverb,' said the indignant Querkuleit. ‘If we're only to concern ourselves with our own troubles the world would be in a fine way.'

‘Looks pretty fine now, what?' The police officer surveyed the young zealot benevolently. Then he became official. ‘We regret to be unable to take action.' He gave another glance at the young man. ‘Of course if you could report that the woman had asked for help …'

Very thoughtfully Querkuleit went home. To his wife he defended the police officer, but she was far from satisfied. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘the police have to see somebody lying dead before they do a thing. They make things easy for themselves.'

‘Well,
don't wake me up any more,' he said firmly. ‘It's quite futile and I need my sleep. The quarrels at the housing office will soon be unbearable.'

But you're probably not called Querkuleit for nothing. It gave him no rest. He woke up by himself now in the middle of the night, lay still so that his wife didn't notice, sensed that she was awake too, and listened. Both listened to the crying in the night. It was difficult to get to sleep again, very difficult to accept that the world had to continue in such disorder. When young, it is difficult to leave abandoned projects behind …

He made no attempt to get in touch with the woman. With the wonderful, youthful notion that he was the leading star in the firmament, he felt that he must now act on his sole responsibility.

Finally, when it got too much for him, he went to the police station without saying anything to his wife and stated that for four or five days there had been knockings on the walls, with appeals for help. He chose a time when the officer in charge of the station was absent. But although the official who interviewed him was unsuspicious, he nearly tripped himself up. Why hadn't the woman called other neighbours? How did she know him? What reason did she give for the ill-treatment? Had she complained about unlawful restraint? Why hadn't she called out of the window for help? Almost every day a policeman went across that courtyard.

It is not so easy for an idealist to live in this world as he would wish. A stubborn attitude rescued Querkuleit from the bog of lies which threatened to engulf him. ‘Very well, I was simply asked to fetch help. I've notified you – you do as you like.'

The police official made up his mind. Once more he drew attention to the unpleasant consequences a false charge might have but when Querkuleit remained unshaken he detailed a policeman to accompany the young man to the flat and have a look round.

Querkuleit and the policeman stood before the door. They rang and rang but nothing stirred within. Querkuleit suggested a locksmith.

The policeman shook his head. ‘That's more than I can do.'

‘But the woman's definitely in the flat.'

‘Why doesn't she answer the door then?'

‘That
she doesn't answer is a sign …'

‘In any case we've no right to break open the door.' He was an elderly officer with an iron-grey moustache, a man devoid of zeal, in fact rather apathetic, Querkuleit considered. However, the policeman pressed the bell once again, with no result, and then said what all say who want an easy life: ‘We can't do any more about it.' And was on the point of going.

At that moment Eugen Bast set foot on the stairs. The blind man was groping for the banisters. As was his custom, he had sent away the boy at the bottom; he knew every step and wanted no spies in his flat.

The two heard him coming, heard the cautious tap-tap on the stairs. Even more distinctly they heard his hand shuffling along the banisters. Now they could see him, but he couldn't see them, and couldn't hear them either …

And seeing him thus, with his scarred, terrible face above a faded field-grey overcoat, blind, menacing, Querkuleit involuntarily placed his hand on the policeman's arm, meaning to warn him to keep silent. But the policeman had understood this.

The blind man did not see them, did not hear them, but he sensed their presence. His head was raised as if he were casting for their scent, as if he wanted to smell them out. ‘Who's there?' he said.

Again the hand on the policeman's arm.

‘There's someone!'

Silence.

‘I'm only a poor blind beggar. Don't play your tricks with a blind man,' went on the false imploring voice.

Silence.

The speaker was now standing in the light of the window, his repulsive face turned full towards them, scarcely a metre away. The face with the open mouth was very near them. It seemed incredible that he could not see them – even though one knew he could not see, it nevertheless remained somehow incredible.

The policeman scrutinized the man. No, he didn't know him. But perhaps it was something in the sound of his voice – one who has much to do with liars instinctively perceives them; perhaps it was also an indefinable something in the man's whole bearing,
something the policeman was hardly conscious of – but a blind beggar would have been helpless and afraid, while this one was tense and suspicious. Querkuleit, however, was now simply frightened of the terrible face close to him.