idiot has to stuff some rubbish or other into a trunk first, and then the smoke makes it impossible for her to escape. How can I help it, if some old girl’s so stupid? The Public Prosecutor would like to make a rope out of it for me. But he doesn’t know Duftermann. I’ve engaged the best lawyers, and if everything goes wrong, I’ll have them give me Paragraph 51, be certified and live off my means in some nice little loony-bin.”
Duftermann quite openly admitted his guilt.
“Why should I tell lies? They caught me with the petrol can in my hand. There’s no point in denying it. Yes, if I were in your shoes I’d deny everything to my dying day. But like this—why I’m just certifiable!”
He roared with laughter.
“After all,” he continued in a tone of self-pity, “it was only my good nature made me do it. I’m just a good- natured fool. I couldn’t bear to see people going on living in such a tumbledown bug-ridden barrack of a place. I wanted to provide them with decent housing—and this is what my good nature gets me.”
In this way, Duftermann drove me to volunteer for work; and I could be sure of his biting scorn, when of an evening I returned to the cell from work, with weary bones but quite peaceful at heart. He would greet me something like this: “Ah, here comes the model boy. Well, did you work hard? Did you suck up to that swine of a governor? The Public Prosecutor will give you just as long in clink as if you’d stayed here quietly in your cell. It’s creepers like you who spoil the whole prison. Your sort make it bad for the rest of us, they’ll make all work compulsory. But you wait, I’ll get you yet.”
I hardly listened to his talk, and never addressed a word to the common fellow. Of course, this did not upset him in the least. He had the hide of a rhinoceros, and calmly went on talking whether I answered or not.
29
Well, I had volunteered for work. Splittstosser, the headwarder, issued me with a new blue jacket as my prison uniform, and with ten or twelve others I was taken into a yard, surrounded by high walls, where great piles of wood lay. Formerly we, too, had taken the firewood for our central heating—bought by the cord from the forestry people—to the prison, to have it chopped up. I had never given it a thought, who sawed and chopped my wood there. Now I myself stood for eight hours a day at the saw-bench, and opposite me stood an habitual burglar named Mordhorst, a man with many previous convictions. Together, for eight hours at a time, we pulled the two-handled saw through pinewood, beechwood and oak. A guard paced to and fro in the yard, watching to see that we did not do too much talking and too little work. Now I was sawing wood for the citizens of my native town, and this time it was Holscher—the general merchant for whom we were working at the moment—who gave no thought to the fact that his old client Sommer was cutting his firewood for him. At first it disturbed me greatly that the fourth side of the yard was bounded by the district court building, and many windows looked down on me and my sawing arms in the blue prison clothes; but within a few days I had become accustomed to it and hardly turned my head when Mordhorst whispered: “The Public Prosecutor’s up at the window again, looking to see if we’re earning our keep. Saw slower, mate. When he’s looking, I’m not working.”
Mordhorst was a small wiry man with a wrinkled embittered face and pepper-green hair. He had spent considerably more than half his life in prison. He took it so much as a matter of course, that he never mentioned it. He regretted nothing, he had no desire for a different life. He never spoke of his crimes, as a craftsman never speaks of his craft. Burglary was to him like sewing trousers to a tailor. I only found out from other prisoners that in the criminal world, Mordhorst was a man of high standing, who could crack the most modern safes, and who was well known for working without a mate, a lone wolf, a typical enemy of society. It only irked him that he had got stuck in such a mudhole, as he called my home-town, more or less by chance. He was on his way to Hamburg, where he had a big job to do, and had got stranded here for a few hours, and in the night, being a little drunk and having nothing to smoke, he had broken into the tobacco kiosk in our market place, and they had caught him at it.
“Just think of it, man,” Mordhorst would rage. “I’d got plenty of cash on me, I could have bought what smokes I wanted where I was staying. Just because I was tight! And for a little thing like that they’ll put me away for a five year stretch. It sends me up in the air, just to think of it!”
To me it seemed all the same whether Mordhorst got five years’ penal servitude for a big safe robbery or a bit of tobacco pilfering, it was five years in any case. But I took good care not to say so aloud, for Mordhorst was a quick-tempered man, and he had startled me early on with his fits of rage when I, an inexperienced newcomer, had pulled the saw so clumsily that it jammed. Once, in a burst of temper, he had tried to hit me on the head with a piece of wood, and only the warder’s intervention had saved me.
Then five minutes later Mordhorst had become normal and sensible again. I suppose it was the long years of imprisonment that had made him so wild and unrestrained. I am sure he had a worm gnawing in his brain, anyone who paces a cell year after year, just waiting for the day of release, of freedom, and knowing all the while in his innermost self that the longest stay in freedom is only a flying visit of a few months at most, to be followed again by years and years of bitter waiting—such a man cannot remain normal.
I learned a great deal from Mordhorst. He knew everything about police-courts, reformatories and prisons. It was quite astonishing how well this silent little man, who seemed to have dealings with nobody, was informed about everything. He knew what kind of meat we were going to get on Sunday, and what the new occupant of cell 21 was supposed to have done. He knew the family circumstances, the salary, and the troubles of each prison officer. He could make a light for a cigarette with a trouser button, a piece of thread and a stone. He always had something to smoke, and something extra to eat, though nobody left any food parcels for him. He always had money in his pocket, which was strictly forbidden, he possessed a knife (also forbidden), and had some means of smuggling letters out of prison without being censored by the governor. He knew all the underground ways which open up in time in any human community, however strictly supervised it may be. I was always a novice to him, a mere babe. He passed on some of his life’s experiences, but never let himself be carried away into confessing anything to me. I was well aware that he treated the other prisoners differently.
Old gaol-birds understand each other by a glance and a wink. They walk behind each other, they hardly move their lips, and something has already been slipped from one hand to the other. The prison officers gave Mordhorst far more freedom than me, for example. They shut one eye to him, he could do almost anything. Perhaps they were afraid of him because he knew so much, but I rather think they shied away from a clash with such a dangerous man. When he had been standing idle at the saw-bench for five minutes on end, and I had whispered: “Hey, get on with the sawing. The warder keeps looking over here,” Mordhorst did nothing of the kind. And when the prison officer finally came over to us and said: “Well, Mordhorst, that’s enough loafing, get on with it!”, he said heatedly: “Don’t I do enough for my thirty pfennigs a day?” (We got thirty pfennigs ‘wages’ a day, which was entered to our credit for the day of our release.) “Am I to work my fingers to the bone for that fat swine?” And he looked wickedly at the windows of the district court. The warder merely laughed and said: “You’ve got your rag out again, have you, Mordhorst? The Prosecutor won’t get any fatter or thinner from your saw.…”
But Mordhorst muttered: “I know what I know,” seized the saw-handle which I held out to him and we went on sawing, thrust after thrust, log after log, hour after hour.
They were good times, really, that we spent in the wood-yard. Today I think back on them quite gladly, however endless and heavy they appeared to me then. After the inevitable aches and pains which my unwonted labours caused me at first, my body soon became used to sawing, and the work helped me to bear much easier the symptoms of my dealcoholisation.
Spring was slowly changing to summer now, in the yard stood high fruit trees, apples and pears, into whose shadow we moved the saw-bench when the sun poured down too hot upon us; the saws groaned and shrieked occasionally when a chip resisted the blade, the clop-clop of the wood-cutter’s axes came to us monotonously; on the other side of the wall, unseen, children shouted at their games in the street. We took off first our jackets, then our waistcoats. Some worked quite naked to the waist, but I could never decide to do so. The hours flowed by, life glided along, I was imbued with a—deceptive—feeling of security and regularity. The time of dangers and disorders seemed over, and it appeared so easy to me to continue this life outside, a quiet peaceful life almost without future. Mordhorst and I softly talked of what we were going to get to eat this evening, and what the food had been like at lunch-time today—food played a most important part in our conversation, since like Mordhorst I got no food parcels, and had to rely on the prison diet even more than he. Moreover he was a better comrade than the pampered Duftermann. Every day he brought me something, some trifle that, outside, would have been of no value, an onion
