The Drinker (17 page)

38

I was clothed by the head-nurse. I got a brown jacket, striped cloth trousers, leather slippers, all new. The head-nurse treated me with discrimination. But perhaps it would have been better if he had given me old rags like the others. They could see I was wearing new things, and it strengthened their dislike of me.

“He wants to be something better than us, the fat swine,” they said, throwing malicious glances at me.

Incidentally, I did something strange while the clothing was being issued. I was allowed to take soap and a toothbrush out of my case, and I was able, in an unwatched moment, to steal a razor-blade. I had done this once before, but then I had been weak and cowardly, I had no idea what was in store for me. Now I would behave differently, I would slash myself without fear of the pain. No, not just yet; what I had done, this secret taking of the razor-blade, was quite a surprise to myself. Not just yet—first I would fight with myself. But should the fight be unavailing … well, all right, when I had had my hearing and my permanent transfer to this institution was confirmed, then, yes, then.… I was not going to spend my life in this hell, that much was certain.

I have taken my first breakfast with my fellow-sufferers. At half past six in the morning, in the rays of the early sun their faces look absolutely disconsolate. Raw faces, animal faces, blunt faces. Over-developed chins or chins completely missing. Cross-eyed men, hunchbacked men, stunted men. As pale and sad as their worn-out clothes. The head-nurse has assigned to me a place at the last table, right back against the wall. That is good. I can see and observe everything and sit quite undisturbed. From the orderly I have got a mug of some hot chicory brew, and the head-nurse has given me three thick slices of bread. Two I spread with margarine and one with jam. I eat them slowly and with great appetite. I chew thoroughly. Who knows what there will be for lunch today? The cabbage-water has frightened me a great deal. Some get more bread, they also get something extra to put on it. The extras may be chives or onion or skim-milk cheese. These, I learn, are the outside workers. They are engaged on heavy work all day, which is why they get such precious titbits.

Shortly after breakfast, the order “Fall in!” is heard, and all those who are working, line up, and are let through the iron-barred door by a keeper, and all that remain behind are the orderlies, the sick, and myself. There are many sick.…

I stand at the window and watch how the people from every block line up in the yard. There are many, many people. Over to the left stands a line of women. Then the yard is emptied. A fat man in a white coat, the head-nurse, has detailed them off for work. Some have marched off with scythes, others with hoes, many have gone to the factory. Now I walk along the corridor with Hielscher, up and down, up and down. Hielscher is a little hunchback, who speaks careful German in a soft, very clear voice. Hielscher calls me “Herr Sommer”, and that does me good. In his clear careful speech, he tells me many things about this place and its inmates. He usually peels potatoes. He has been peeling potatoes for six years. Altogether he has been eleven years in the asylum.

“I am a sexual offender,” he says gently, choosing his words with care. “The medical officer has made his report about me. I got congenital mental deficiency coupled with lack of control and a drastically impaired sense of responsibility, and besides I have a hump, that is obvious of course, and also I limp. Is that bad, Herr Sommer?”

I am quite perplexed at this question.

“Bad?” I ask, embarrassed. “How do you mean, bad?”

“Well, is it a bad ailment or only a slight one, Herr Sommer?” And he looks at me with his lively but sad eyes.

“No, it’s probably not too bad.”

“That is what I think,” says Hielscher. “I’m sure they’ll soon release me. Have you by chance a little tobacco for me, Herr Sommer?”

I told Hielscher that I had a longing for tobacco myself, and that unfortunately I had none to give him. Thereupon Hielscher’s interest in me faded rapidly, he left me, and I wandered alone up and down the corridor. That morning was interminable. I walked and walked, but the hands of the clock did not move on. Sometimes I glanced into one of the two day-rooms, but the torpid figures sitting there, the wrecks, repelled me. Only the orderlies were busy with bucket and broom, clean-looking, well set-up men, as in all prisons, skilful and unscrupulous, sucking up to the officials, informing on their fellow-prisoners about every trifle, corrupt, and rude to their comrades. I saw them going from cell to cell, pretending to tidy up, but mainly searching the beds for a hidden slice of bread or a plug of tobacco. It strengthened me in my antipathy when I saw that the hated Lexer was also a kind of orderly, an assistant-orderly, who spent the greater part of the day over in one of the workshops in the annexe, making brushes, but who always contrived also to make a job for himself in the block.

The staircase was being cleaned by a man in his middle years, with a face once clever but now confused and hopelessly sad; from time to time he broke off his cleaning, tore open a window and shouted filthy insults through the bars at some imaginary person outside. I watched Lexer creep up behind the yelling man, spring on him from the back and beat his head again and again against the iron bars.

He cried shrilly: “Will you get on with your work, you swine! What are you shouting about! You want to eat but you don’t want to work for it! Just you wait!”

And he beat his head again. I would have liked to help the poor fellow, but the grill on to the staircase was locked and during the previous night I had firmly resolved not to interfere in any quarrels but to remain completely neutral. The more unobtrusively I lived, the more favourable would be the doctor’s report. Besides, I was afraid of Lexer, and I had every reason to be. I long observed this scoundrel—or lout, rather; he was only in his middle twenties and of extremely backward development—with the watchful eyes of hatred. He was a born bloodhound. He took a delight in torturing his fellow-prisoners, he was always cuffing them here and pinching them there, hitting them, reporting them to the head-nurse. Nothing was too petty for him. If a prisoner brought in an onion he had secretly picked up, Lexer would either take it from him or else denounce him to the head-nurse as a thief. And since the onion really would be stolen, only from the institution garden of course, the thief would be bound to get fourteen days in the lock-up. The weaker ones Lexer would entice into some quiet corner and there he would beat them until they handed over their tobacco or whatever else of their possessions he coveted. The stronger ones he approached with cunning, deceiving them with promises of bread and never keeping his promise. But with the keepers, Lexer was not at all unpopular. He played the part of the court-jester; in his shrill insolent way, he always had some quick-witted joke at hand, usually at the expense of his fellow-prisoners. He would perform any service for the keepers quickly, skilfully, willingly, and if he was caught in any misdemeanour, he would take his thrashing with a comically lachrymose expression.

“You can’t be angry with the swine,” said the keepers and they tolerated him and his tyranny over the other prisoners. He was particularly useful to them; through him they got to know everything that happened in the place.

Lexer had been put into an orphanage at the age of six and from then on he had only spent a few weeks or months at liberty, and had always returned into the safe keeping of the State: in approved schools, reformatories, prisons. Eventually they had put him into this institution as incorrigible, and as he well knew, for life. But that did not upset him in the least. In this place, which seemed a hell to me, he was like a pig in clover. He felt in his element here. Here he could give rein to all his malevolence. He played the assistant-orderly, the assistant-keeper, the head devil. Here he was, beating the head of an imbecile, a schizophrene, against the bars and probably expecting praise for keeping the inmates so strictly to their tasks.

39

Even an interminable morning comes to an end. Lunch-time came, and the prisoners smiled: it was a good day, they got a good meal. Each man received in a string bag a pound and a half of potatoes in their jackets, and with it, in his aluminium bowl, a ladleful of sharply spiced gravy in which floated a few shreds of meat. Laboriously I peeled my potatoes with a spoon; knives and forks were too dangerous in this place of constant fighting. Watching the men as they ate, I noticed some who peeled their potatoes, put them in the gravy and waited until they finished peeling before they began to eat. But these were in the minority: most were so famished that they could not wait. The potatoes disappeared into their mouths just as they were peeled, only a few ever reached the gravy. Near me I saw a fat stocky man with iron-grey hair and the reddish-brown sunburnt face of a land-worker, who ate his peelings as he cut them off. I had hardly finished peeling my potatoes, when he threw a questioning glance at me, reached his calloused hand across the table, scooped up all my leavings and thrust them into his mouth.

“Hey!” I called. “There was a rotten potato among that lot!”

“Don’t matter, mate,” he said, chewing eagerly. “I’ve got to mow all day, I never get enough. Perhaps I can pinch some pig-spuds tonight. Hope so!”

He was not the only glutton, they were all hungry, always, even directly after a meal. I saw sick men going round, stealing tiny crumbs of potato off the table, while others scraped out their already spotless bowls. I saw one in the corridor polishing the inside of the gravy cauldron with his finger which he licked again and again. All this was happening under the eyes of the keeper, who regarded it as a commonplace affair.

Here I am anticipating somewhat, but in this chapter I want to have done with my description of asylum meals, though it is not yet a closed chapter for me even today. We never got fresh meat to eat, just occasionally shreds—never lumps—of some old red salt meat floating in the gravy, and very rare shreds, at that! There was never butter, sausage or cheese, never an apple. And everything we had was quite inadequate, always watered-down, and badly prepared. Why it was so, I cannot imagine, even today. The prisoners maintained that the head-nurse was eating everything himself. But even the greediest head-nurse can’t put away the food of a few hundred men. Perhaps the authorities wanted to take away our nature a bit, but I must confess that even on this starvation diet, the passions remained lively enough. However there were always folk among us who suffered no such hunger, who even lived fatly, within certain limits. First there were the orderlies, who had to cut, weigh and spread our bread for us. Officially a keeper stood by and watched, but let the telephone ring and the keeper would have to leave the kitchen and go into the glass box, and immediately a few slices would be thickly spread and disappear. Prisoners have sharp eyes, and hunger makes them sharper; it was inevitable that they should get to know that they were being robbed. One might see an orderly chewing a piece of bread in the lavatory, another might surprise him giving it to a “friend” or trading it for tobacco. But there was no point in informing on them. It was difficult to prove anything, almost impossible, for even if the bread was found (which hardly ever happened because no keeper could be bothered to look for it) the orderly could say “I saved it up from breakfast”; and then the orderlies were the keepers’ blue-eyed boys, their tale-bearers; they would not hear a word against them. So practically nothing ever happened about it, but the envy and the hatred was kept awake all the time.

Even worse than this furtive way of procuring food was a quite legal way, condoned and even encouraged by the authorities. Such of the inmates as still had obliging relatives outside, were allowed to receive food parcels as often as they wished. One might expect that almost every one of the patients would have such relatives outside, who might at least send him a loaf now and then—even dry bread was a longed-for commodity there. But such was not the case. Apart from the fact that many of the inmates could neither read nor write (this dreadful place housed only the last dregs of humanity) or else were too insane or dull-witted to do so, the relatives of the majority did not wish to acknowledge them any more. They had caused grief and shame enough when they were outside, and now that they had been in this place for five, ten, even twenty years, they were done with and forgotten by those outside, to them they were dead and buried.

No, there were very few who got parcels; out of the fifty-six men in my block, perhaps only five or six. But these sat plump and well-fed at our common meal-table and lay beside the bowls full of watery soup, their thickly-spread bread, with sausage and cheese we never got a taste of; yes I even lived to see a fat peasant who had been put away on account of his ungovernable temper, devouring a roast duck at his ease in front of us, gnawing it bone by bone. He dripped with fat, and we sat by with our eyes growing bigger and bigger, our slavering mouths filling with water, our hands trembling, and our hearts full of envy and greed.

From all this, from our constant hunger, and our hatred of the thieving orderlies and our envy of the gluttons, arose an endless round of acrimony, quarrels, fights, punishments. There was not a day’s peace in the place, always something going on. One no longer even listened when two men insulted each other in the most obscene manner. One merely walked away when they blacked each other’s eyes and bloodied each other’s noses. One was thankful not to be involved oneself. One had to watch every word that was said, it would be immediately passed on, immediately turned against the speaker.

For my own part, I must confess that at first it was not only with envy that I regarded these parcel-hogs. It was so simple for me, I had only to write a letter to Magda and I could belong to this privileged class. Magda wouldn’t be one to let her own husband starve! For a week I struggled with myself, and then hunger won, I decided to write. I had neither writing paper nor envelope, and nothing of the sort was provided by the institution; but I saved a slice of bread and got what I wanted. I wrote the letter, and then I waited. In bed of an evening I pictured to myself what would be in the parcel; when I thought of a slice of bread thickly spread with fat liver-sausage, I was nearly sick with hunger and craving. I had calculated the earliest day on which the parcel could arrive, but that day passed, and many days after it, and the parcel did not come. Then I heard that all communications had first to go through the censorship of the medical officer and then be passed over to the administrative offices for franking, and that letters were not sent off immediately, but only after a while, when a number had accumulated.

“They take their time,” said the prisoners. “Do you think they’ll start running just because you want ’em to? They sit all the firmer on their arses.”

So I went on waiting and hoping.

Then one day the head-nurse casually said, “There’s a letter of yours in the office, Sommer. They say it can’t go, you’ve got no money for the postage.”

“What,” I cried. “Because of twelve pfennigs postage I can’t send a letter! I sent my wife four thousand marks from the remand prison!”

“You should have kept a few marks back,” said the head-nurse, and tried to pass on.

“But sir,” I cried, “It’s not possible! Just for twelve pfennigs! They can ring up my wife, and she’ll confirm …”

“A phone call costs ten pfennigs, and you haven’t got it, Sommer,” said the head-nurse coolly. “Keep calm, your letter will go off all right, next month when your first wages are credited to you.”

I have no idea whether my letter to Magda was eventually sent off or whether it got lost in the meantime. Anyhow, I never got a food parcel, I always remained among the hungry ones, the greedy envious ones. For by the time I finally had some wages to my credit, I had long become too dispirited to write to Magda.