Wolf Among Wolves (92 page)

“But he hasn’t, Petra!” cried old Minna joyfully. “What silly ideas you’ve got! He hasn’t done that at all.”

“Now you’re lying, Minna. You just told me yourself.”

“I said nothing of the sort! No, just come out with me now. I’ve had enough of your stink and dust.”

“I’m not going out. I’m not going to him!”

“But he isn’t outside! You’re just imagining it.”

“You said it yourself, Minna—please, let us stay here.”

“I said I wanted to write to him that you are expecting a baby. How can I want to write to him if he’s standing outside? You’re just imagining it all, Petra, because you are afraid, afraid of your own heart and afraid for the child. And because you’re afraid, everything’s all right. And now just let anyone, madam or anyone else, say anything against you—I know different. I’m glad you’ve spoken this way. I know now what I have to write to him, not too much and not
too little. Now ask for an hour off and come out, there must be something like a café in the neighborhood. I pinched his letter for you, and madam didn’t say a word although she saw me. But you must give it back; you can copy it quickly if you like. Well, where shall we go? Can you get the time off?”

“Why shouldn’t I get the time off?” said Petra with bravado. “I take time off when I like! Everything you see here,” and she went with Minna to the hut door, “everything, the rags, the paper, the old iron and the bottles—it’s all under my management, and the men working here too, of course. Herr Randolph,” she said to an old man, “I’m going up to my room for a bit with my friend. If there’s anything special you’ve only got to call me.”

“What do you call special, Fräulein? Do you think they’ll be bringing in Kaiser Bill’s crown this afternoon? You go and have a lie down. If I was you I wouldn’t stick all afternoon among the rags!”

“Very well, Herr Randolph,” said Petra happily. “After all, it’s the first time I’m having a visitor here.”

And the two of them went up to Ma Krupass’s little flat, sat down, talked, and talked more.

When the time came for Minna to go home to make supper for her mistress, she did what she had not done since time immemorial; she went to the telephone and announced that she was not coming, that the key of the larder was in the right drawer of the kitchen sideboard behind the spoons, and that the key to the right drawer was in the pocket of her blue apron hanging up with the tea towels. And before Frau Pagel had quite grasped these clear instructions, Minna had already hung up. “Otherwise she’d start pumping me on the telephone, and she can wait for once. Now go on telling me about your Ma Krupass—pinches cuff links and yet has a good heart. Such things are neither in prayer book or bible. How long has she got, did you say?”

“Four months—and that’s just as if the court had known, for I’ll be confined at the beginning of December and she’ll be coming out at the end of November. She didn’t appeal—her lawyer said she ought to be glad. But still, it’s a pity when an old woman like that is up before the judge. I was there, and he told her off properly, and all the time she was crying like a child.”

It was half-past ten before Minna came home. She saw the light in her mistress’s room, but “You can wait!” she told herself, and crept quietly to her bed. But not quietly enough. For Frau Pagel called out: “Is that you, Minna? Well, thank God for that. I was beginning to think you were taking to night life in your old age.”

“Seems like it, madam,” said Minna staunchly. And then, with affected innocence: “Is there anything else madam would like?”

“Why, you deceitful cat!” cried Frau Pagel angrily. “Are you pretending you don’t know what’s itching me? What have you found out?”

“Oh, nothing special,” said Minna off-hand. “Just that madam will soon be a grandmother.” And with that she fled into her room with a speed that one would never have thought possible in such an old bag of bones, and slammed the door, as if to say: “Consulting hours are over for this evening.”

“Well, I never!” said old Frau Pagel, vigorously rubbing her nose and looking dreamily at the spot on the carpet where her vixen of a servant had been standing. “That’s a nice way to tell me! Grandmother! A moment ago a widow without any encumbrances, and now suddenly a grandmother.… Oh, no, we shan’t swallow that medicine, even if you do give it to me so craftily, you spiteful old devil!”

With that Frau Pagel shook her fist at the empty passage and withdrew into her room. But she could not have thought the news too bad, for she fell asleep so soundly that she did not hear Minna creeping out of the house with a letter. And it was now past midnight!

This letter was the beginning of that correspondence which, even though it did not contain a line from Petra Ledig, turned Wolfgang Pagel into a young man who, in Herr Studmann’s words, looked as if he wanted to embrace the world.

III

When Wolfgang Pagel bicycled to the prisoners on his own, and Violet von Prackwitz agreed to this without demur, although she would rather have spent the morning with the young man herself, it was because a higher will prevailed to which everyone had to agree: That of the Principal Warder Marofke. This ridiculous, conceited little man with a potbelly not only made the faces of his convicts sullen—whenever he entered the farm office with one of his never-ending requests, Frau von Prackwitz groaned: “Lord, here he is again!” and Studmann frowned. The workers, the chief guards and their assistants cursed the principle—but quietly. The girls in the kitchen cursed “the conceited clown”—only very loudly.

Marofke was always finding something wrong. First the mutton was too fat, then the pork was too scanty. There had been no peas for three weeks, but white cabbage had been cooked twice a week. The men didn’t return punctually from work, and the meals were not punctual. That window had to be walled up, otherwise the prisoners could see into a room occupied by girls. It was not permissible for the lavatory next to the barracks to be used by villagers—women, for instance. It was likewise not permissible for women to let themselves be seen near the gang at work; it might excite the men.

There was no end to it. Yet this potbellied rascal made life damned easy for himself. He usually left the supervision of the gang to his subordinates, the four warders, and sat almost the whole day in his barracks, drawing up lists in a self-important manner, or writing reports to the prison administration, or striding restlessly through the rooms, pulling every bed to pieces, for inspection. A spoon handle from which a prisoner had made himself a pipe cleaner aroused him to intense thought. What could it signify? A pipe cleaner, of course; but whoever could make that could also make a skeleton key! And he inspected every lock, every iron bar, every socket. Then he strode to the closet, lifted up the lavatory seat, and looked down to see if there was only toilet paper or perhaps the torn bits of a letter there.

But most of the time he sat outside the barracks in the sun, twiddling his thumbs over his fat belly, eyes half-closed, thinking. The people who saw him sitting there so comfortable and sleepy laughed at him contemptuously. For in the country it is a shame for any healthy man to laze during the harvest. Everyone is needed; there are not enough hands.

But it must be admitted that the principal warder was not daydreaming in the sun; he actually was thinking. He thought uninterruptedly of his fifty prisoners. He recalled their sentences, their crimes, their ages, their relations with the world, how much time each had still to serve. He examined their characters man by man, he thought of incidents in the prison, trifling events which, however, vividly revealed what a man was capable of. When the men ate, rested, talked, slept, he observed them. He noticed who spoke to whom; he noticed friendships, hostilities. And as a result of his observations and reflections there was a continuous redistribution; enemies were placed together, friendships were torn asunder. Those who hated each other had to sleep in neighboring beds. Continually Marofke changed the order of sitting at table; he decided who should work by himself, whom the warders must always keep their eyes on.

And the prisoners hated their Marofke like the plague; the warders, to whom he gave endless trouble, cursed him behind his back. At the slightest contradiction he went scarlet, his fat belly shook, his hanging chops trembled. “I make you responsible for it, warder!” he shouted. “You have sworn an oath to do your duty!”

“These fault-finders always exist!” said Studmann with disgust. “It’s best to let them alone. Even God wouldn’t do anything right for them!”

“No!” said Pagel. “This time you are wrong. He is a really cunning fox. And efficient.”

“Now I ask you, Pagel!” said the irritated Studmann. “Have you ever seen this man doing regular duty like his colleagues? Yes, sit in the sun and think
out new complaints, that’s all he can do. Unfortunately, I can’t say anything to the fellow; he’s subject only to the prison authorities. But you can be certain if I were his superior I’d give that fat fellow a bit of exercise!”

“Very efficient,” Pagel had persisted. “And cunning. And diligent. Well, you’ll see.”

Yes, Pagel was the only one who believed in the merits of this unbearable buffoon, and it was probably because of this that the two got on well together.

That morning, before riding out to the field, Pagel had paid the principal warder a short visit. Herr Marofke was very susceptible to such courtesies. He was sitting at his table, his face red, staring at a letter which the postman had probably just brought him. Pagel could see that there was a storm in the offing. “Well, any news from the western front, chief?” he asked.

The little man jumped to his feet so suddenly that his chair fell over with a crash. Slapping the letter, he cried: “Yes, news, but not good news! Rejected—my petition to be relieved is rejected!”

“Did you want to leave us?” said Pagel, astonished. “I didn’t know that.”

“Me leave? Nonsense! I wouldn’t let myself be relieved of such a difficult post. Me a shirker? No, never have been—people can say what they like about me. No.” He was calmer. “I can tell you about it—you’ll keep your mouth shut. I made a request that five men should be relieved because they no longer seem safe to me. And the pen-pushers in the office have rejected it—they say my request has no grounds! They have to have a murdered warder in their office before they have their grounds. Idiots!”

“But everything is quite peaceful,” said Pagel soothingly. “I haven’t noticed the slightest thing. Or did anything happen last night?”

“You also think that something must happen first,” growled the principal warder sullenly. “If anything happens in a prison gang, young man, then it is already too late. But I don’t blame you for that; you’ve no experience, and you know nothing about convicts.… Even my colleagues don’t see anything—only this morning they said again that I had a bee in my bonnet—but better to have a bee in your bonnet than be a night owl that sees nothing by day.”

“But what in heaven’s name is wrong?” asked Pagel, surprised at so much sullen rage. “What have you found, officer?”

“Nothing!” said the principal warder dully. “No note, no skeleton key, no money, no weapon—nothing to indicate escape or revolt. But it stinks of it. I’ve been smelling it for days. I notice things like that. Something is going on.”

“But why? What makes you think so?”

“I’ve been in prison over twenty-five years,” confessed Herr Marofke, and saw nothing objectionable in saying so. On the contrary! “I know my men.
During the whole of my time of service three have escaped. For two of them I was not responsible, and as for the third, I had only been in service for six months—one doesn’t know anything in that time. But today I do know something, and I swear to you—those five have got something on, and until I get them out of my gang, my gang won’t be clean!”

“Which five?” Pagel had the impression that the principal warder was imagining things.

“I made a request for the following men to be relieved,” said Marofke solemnly. “Liebschner, Kosegarten, Matzke, Wendt, Holdrian.”

“But those are just our pleasantest, most intelligent and handiest men! Except for old Wendt—he’s a bit daft.”

“They’ve only got him in it as a safety valve. He’s to be their scapegoat if there’s any danger. Wendt is their forfeit, as it were, but the other four …” He sighed. “I’ve tried everything to separate them. I’ve redistributed them, none of them sleeps in the same room as the others, I don’t let them sit together, I show favor to one and treat the others severely, which usually makes them angry—but no, hardly do I turn my back when they’re together again, whispering.”

“Perhaps they just like each other?” suggested Pagel. “Perhaps they’re friends.”

“There are no friendships in prison,” declared the principal warder. “In prison everyone is always the other’s enemy. Whenever two stick together they are conspirators—for a definite purpose. No, it stinks; if I tell you that—I, Principal Warder Marofke—then you can believe it!”

For a while they were silent. “I’m going out to the men now,” Pagel said finally in order to get away. “I’ll keep my eyes open in case I see anything.”

“What do you think you’ll see?” said the principal warder. “They are tough lads—they’d make an old detective inspector sweat. Before you’d see anything you’d be lying there with a hole in your skull. No, I’ve thought it over. Since they’ve rejected my request, I’m going all out. I shall cause a mutiny at lunch time; I’ll shove salt in their food, literally; I’ll put so much salt in their grub that they won’t be able to swallow it. And then I shall force them to eat. I’ll taunt them and threaten them until they mutiny. And then I shall have my grounds; then I shall grab my five and send them back as mutineers. That’ll cost them another year or two in prison.” He giggled in scorn.

“Well, I’m damned!” Pagel was horrified. “But it might go wrong. Five men against fifty in that narrow room!”

“Young man!” said the principal warder, and he no longer appeared ridiculous to Pagel. “If you know for certain that someone wants to attack you from the back, what do you do? You turn round and attack him. That’s the way I am. I’d rather be killed from the front than from behind.”