My heart stops and again I would like to jump up, to snatch from him the razor-blade which he has now found, though I had carefully wrapped it in an old newspaper. He throws a glance at me. I shut my eyes, I am asleep. Then, when I peer again, I see that he is wrapping up the blade once more in the newspaper, and he puts it back in my pocket. Then he is gone. But I have realised the danger. With one bound I spring out of bed, take out the blade, and hurry with it to the lavatory. A pull of the plug, and the blade has disappeared, that precious blade that was to have opened the way to freedom for me if all else failed. A minute later I am in bed again. None too soon! For there stands the head-nurse by my bed and he puts his hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, Sommer!”
I wake up, just right I hope, not too easily, not too slowly.
“Get up, Sommer!”
I do so, and stand before him in my shirt.
“Sommer, have you got something forbidden in your pockets?”
“No, sir.”
“You know that anything that cuts is strictly forbidden here, for instance table-knives, razor-blades, nail-files. You know that?”
“Yes, sir, so I’ve been told.”
“And you have nothing in your pockets that’s forbidden?”
“No, sir.”
A short pause.
Then: “Sommer, I’m warning you. Own up, and I’ll shut one eye to it. Otherwise, on your first day I’ll put you under punishment for four weeks.”
“I’ve nothing to own up to, sir.”
“All right, then turn out your pockets.”
I do so, beginning with my jacket. I leave the trousers pocket till last.
“Undo this newspaper, Sommer.”
I do so. Nothing, absolutely nothing. The head-nurse stands thoughtfully for a moment. Then he goes through my clothes himself, garment by garment, but again nothing.
“Get dressed, Sommer.”
I do so.
“All right. Now send Lexer to me. You will stay in the day-room till the leisure-hour.”
“Yes, sir.”
I had set them a lovely task: under the supervision of the head-nurse, all the orderlies searched the whole cell, bit by bit. They found all manner of things, but no razor-blade. In the end, they abused Lexer, they imagined it was some idiotic roguish trick of his. But Lexer at least knew that I had really had a razor-blade. I had got the better of him. And strangely enough, though they all abused him, from the head-nurse down, he bore me no grudge. I had got the better of him, that impressed him. From that time, he never picked on me directly, though he could never quite leave off nagging.
41
The afternoon was endless. The only slight diversion was that, for our “leisure hour” we were taken outside for two hours from two to four. “Outside” was a small garden within the high prison walls, perhaps four hundred square yards in extent, in which a single narrow path, just wide enough for two people, ran round a grass plot. The sun was shining, it was a fine summer day. But what the sun shone upon was not so fine. I am not speaking now of the surroundings, high walls, red and naked or clothed with dead grey cement, decked with barbed-wire, the bars at the windows, the blind window-panes—this alone is enough to rob the most beautiful summer day of its brilliance.
But I do not mean all this. I mean my comrades, my fellow-sufferers, who lean against the wall in their discoloured rags squat on a bench, or scuffle along the sandy path, in wooden shoes or barefoot. How revealing is the pitiless sunlight on these faces, which seem merely like distant lost memories. Grief, sadness, bestiality and mad despair. I shut my eyes and see them standing, squatting, scuffling there, as I have seen them a hundred times, and shall perhaps see them a thousand times more. There is a tall shaky man whose close-cropped iron-grey head is covered with blood-red or festering “pig-boils” as they call furuncles here, his face hard and angular and his dark deep set eyes entirely devoid of brightness. Ceaselessly, this fellow, a Rhinelander who was once probably a street-trader, murmurs: “Two hundredweight Kanalstrasse 20, one hundredweight Meier, Triftstrasse 10, market police, market police.…”
He raises his voice as he looks up to the blind barred windows, waiting for buyers. “Seed potatoes! Seed potatoes! Buy my seed potatoes!”
No buyers come. Despairingly he shakes his hideous head and begins again: “Two hundredweight Kanalstrasse 20, one hundredweight.…”
Yet if you ask him what time it is, he looks up at the sun and gives you quite a sensible and approximately correct answer, but no sooner has he done so than he resumes his eternal litany once more: “Seed potatoes! Seed potatoes! Buy my seed potatoes!”
How it still rings in my ears!
And then there is that other whom I have already mentioned, the schizophrene who hears voices, whose poor sad head Lexer had so mercilessly beaten against the iron bars—he shuffles round and round in slippers whose entire back part is missing. Suddenly he stops, he lifts his arm and makes a threatening gesture towards sky, walls and bars, but he does not see sky, walls and bars, he sees some invisible enemy whom he now threatens in a most obscene way. He is the only Saxon amongst us, and his abuse is uttered in such a pure Saxon dialect that the few among us who have their senses, smile. But it is really nothing to smile at when this lost man, the son of a good family, abuses the unseen enemy who prevents him from explaining everything to his parents. Why does he always thrust himself in the way, what is he after, this eternal trouble-maker? Isn’t the son the one best qualified to explain things to his parents?
Apparently this poor fellow had once committed some offence which had separated him from his parents. Perhaps it was only some indiscretion; in any case he was weak—he had wanted to hurry to his parents to explain everything to them; but he had been arrested straight away. And the years went by, one after another, and the iron bars were still between him and his parents, between his guilt and the family discussion that would have set his heart free. He threw himself against the bars, he cared nothing that some swine beat his face till the blood came, he fought day after day with an enemy invisible to us, and day after day he took up the fight anew. In between times, one could exchange a sensible word with him too, about the primitive things of life, how the soup had tasted and where the handbrush was. He even managed a little work; as I have already said, he swept the staircase. Incidentally this Saxon, Lachs, was the one who got most food parcels from home; but unfortunately he no longer noticed what he ate, it was all the same to him whatever the head-nurse put in his hand.
A third man, who talked a great deal, was a wiry patient with sharp features and a narrow aquiline nose: he looked like a white-skinned Arab. He laboured under the delusion that he was a high-ranking politician of a neighbouring country who had a bad reputation for recklessness, even for murderous tendencies. This patient always walked round in a circle or leaned against the fence which shut off our little grass patch from the main building. When he was thus leaning, he gave the impression that he had been there for ever; his bleached discoloured clothes seemed to melt away in the sunlight, leaving visible only his once-bold Arab face. Most of what he cunningly babbled to himself, with a sardonic giggle, is unrepeatable; he indulged in long fantasies in which he cut off the sex organs of his enemies, male or female, and ate them. Sometimes he indulged in such rigmaroles as this: “It is logical that you should have first to pass the examination at Landsberg, if you want to be a Field-Marshal in England. Otherwise of course it can’t happen. You wear a red-boot on the right foot, a blue one on the left. …”
He turned and sniggered at me, highly amused, and then immediately in full swing, he mowed down the French with a machine gun and in the same breath he remarked on the unbridled lasciviousness of Tungus virgins. His brain was constantly busy associating the most incompatible things, it was as if he were threading necklaces in which an old shoepolish tin dangled next to an ostrich-feather fan. With this man, one could have no sensible conversation; if he was addressed, he never listened, but either calmly went on talking or else fell silent. A fellow-
