person with a red face. She rushes up to one girl who has a few curls hanging at her temples, under her kerchief.
“What’s this?” she cries angrily. “All you think of is men, eh? Wait, I’ll show you to make yourself pretty here!” and she tears the scarf off the girl’s head.
“What!” she cries indignantly. “You’ve been pinning curls up, have you? Haven’t I told you a thousand times you’ve got to wear just a simple parting? I’ll show you!”
And she tugged at the girl’s hair, she tugged the few poor curls apart. Without a sign of protest or pain the girl patiently moved her head this way and that as her tormentor pulled her hair. But I had no time to follow this shocking incident (which I seemed to be the only one to find shocking) any further.
The head-nurse came towards me. “Quickly, Sommer, pack up your bedding and your things. You’re being transferred!”
My bedding and belongings were packed into a bundle quickly enough, and I followed the keeper, who opened a cell door near the glass box. The cell was smaller than my former one, but there were only four beds in it. Fortunately one did not sleep in two tiers here. The cell was lighter and more airy too, it did not smell bad. I had decidedly bettered myself; I rightly attributed it to the doctor’s influence. “Thank God, he’s favourably inclined towards me,” I thought. “Everything’s all right.” Meanwhile the head-nurse had chased an old man out of bed.
“Come on, come on, out of it, Meier,” he cried. “Be a bit quick about it. You’re going in Wing 2.”
“Oh God!” wailed the old man; “Have I really got to move, sir? I get pushed around all the time! I’ve only had this bed a few weeks! And it was so peaceful in here, and such nice air.…”
But the head-nurse was not inclined to listen to an old man’s jeremiads.
“Out of it, Meier!” he shouted and he gave the old man a violent push. “Stop your nattering!”
With his bundle of bedding, the old man staggered out of his cell on his thin sticks of legs; his short shirt barely covering his behind.
“You can make your bed later!” said the head-nurse. “Now come with me to the doctor. He’s waiting.”
47
The doctor really was waiting for me—hardly an hour had gone by and a good seventy patients had already been treated.
Dr Stiebing, in a white coat, smiled at me amiably, invited me to sit down, and even offered his hand. The head-nurse stood in the background, with watchful eyes, waiting; not a word, not a movement, did he miss. I was pleased that he saw with what discrimination the doctor treated me, this friendly greeting now, beforehand, the transfer to a better cell—he would be careful about dealing too hard with me.
“Well,” said the doctor, smiling, “Now you’ve landed up with me, Herr Sommer. A fortnight ago we could have put you in somewhat more comfortable surroundings, my colleague Mansfeld and I. Well, well, you’ll be able to bear it here. It is a well-disciplined place, you’ll get your rights here. A little discipline is good for everybody, isn’t it?”
He was really amiability itself. Rather touched, I thanked him for the better sleeping quarters allotted to me.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll do what we can to make your stay here easier. Of course there are certain unchangeable house-rules.…”
He looked at me with a friendly expression of regret.
Then: “And you’ll do everything you can to lighten our task, too, won’t you, Herr Sommer?”
I assured the doctor of this, and asked whether he had to make a report on me.
“No, not yet,” he said quickly. “I suppose they will ask me for one, but for the time being you have just been assigned here for a stay, Herr Sommer.”
“But then everything will take so long!” I wailed. “Why can’t you make out your report immediately? It’s quite a clear affair. It’s only a slight case of uttering threats, and I’m convinced that Magda, that my wife will testify that she had not really felt herself menaced by me at all. For such a small matter as that, they can’t keep me here for weeks!”
I had been speaking more and more seriously and emphatically. I wanted to make it clear right away what an enormous disparity existed between my slip and my stay here.
“But, but,” cried the doctor, and laid a soothing hand on my arm. “Why are you in such a hurry! First you must have a thorough rest and get quite well again …”
“But I am quite well,” I assured him.
“No dizziness?” asked the doctor. “No sweating? No loss of appetite and then sudden hunger? No longing for alcohol?”
“I simply never think of alcohol!” I cried, shocked at such a dangerous suspicion. “I feel absolutely well!”
“Really no symptoms of de-alcoholisation then?” asked the doctor doubtfully. “Well, how is it, head-nurse? Have you noticed anything?”
I looked expectantly into the hard dark face of the head-nurse. He could not have noticed the slightest thing, of that I was sure.
“Yesterday evening,” he reported, “Sommer felt an urgent hunger and demanded supper, but he only ate four or five spoonfuls of it. Lexer swore today that Sommer had a razor-blade in his pocket; we couldn’t find it, but still —as a rule Lexer’s information has been reliable up to now. Then, too, Sommer is very restless, he can’t stay in one place for five minutes, can’t occupy himself with anything, hasn’t touched a newspaper …”
“But,” I cried, indignant and shocked at such misleading information, “there’s quite other reasons for all that. That has nothing to do with alcohol or the symptoms of de-alcoholisation either. Really, doctor, I never think of schnaps …”
The doctor and the head-nurse both smiled thinly.
“But really,” I cried still more emphatically. “I have had such a shock, with my arrest and all its consequences; I’ll never touch another drop of alcohol as long as I live!”
“That sounds better,” said Dr Stiebing amiably, and he nodded.
“And if I only ate a little of my cabbage soup yesterday, it’s merely because I’m not used to this kind of food. Certainly,” I added hastily, “the cabbage soup was very good, but at home I just eat different things …”
They both looked at me watchfully.
“And if I’ve been walking up and down a bit and haven’t been able to rest, it is quite explicable, in my position. Anyone who is uncertain about his whole future is bound to be restless. Anyway, everybody paces about if they have to wait a long time, you can see that in any dentist’s waiting-room or police-court corridor …”
“All right, all right,” the doctor interrupted, but I had the feeling that I had not convinced him, and that he did not find it “all right” in the least.
“And what about the razor-blade? You’ve quite omitted that!”
I tried not to blush—and yet.… No, perhaps I did not blush at all, I only imagined it. In any case I said with great firmness, “I didn’t omit the razor-blade. I just didn’t think any more of it. I’ve never had a razor-blade here. Why should I? I’ve got no razor.…”
Perhaps I pretended to be too simple, perhaps the doctor had it in mind that an accused person always protests most vigorously against a false charge. In any event, I found this preliminary discussion, in which my case was not even mentioned, full of snares and subterfuges.
I could not guess what the doctor thought of my words. Quite kindly, he said:
“In any case, I hear that it’s not long ago since you first started to drink, so the effects of de-alcoholisation shouldn’t be so drastic. You were previously in remand prison too …”
“Yes,” I said, “and I worked every day in the wood-yard there—I volunteered for it—and you can ask any warder whether I didn’t do as much work as anyone else, though I’m not really used to this kind of work.”
“You drank quite heavily then?” asked the doctor, and he seemed disinclined to pursue enquiries about the quality of my wood-cutting. “One might say, very heavily?”
“Never more than I could stand!” I assured him. “I never staggered, sir, and I never fell about.”
For a moment I was obliged to recall that scene when I tried again and again to pull myself up on to the roof-edge below Elinor’s window, and kept falling back into the bushes. And immediately another scene came to
