whose fulfilment had become very difficult owing to the Attorney-General’s attitude. In any case, instead of his longed-for freedom, Herbst first got fourteen days in the punishment cells, and then returned to his old job of orderly. He was a bad character and yet I had to admire the way in which he took this dreadful disappointment. He never said another word about release, he did his work as quickly, cleanly, and dishonestly as before, he lived only for the institution and its routine.
49
Of my third cell-mate, Holz by name, I have little enough to report. He was a strong young man of about thirty—looking younger than his years, and one might have thought the little fair moustache under his nose coquettish, had it not been that his immeasurably sad face forbade any thought of coquetry. He had only been some six months in the institution, but he had come straight from a convict prison, where he had spent six years.
As Qual was either silent or else talked nonsense, and as Herbst could only talk about himself, his friend, or his hated fellow-prisoners, Holz was the one I chatted with for the two hours between half-past seven and half-past nine when we usually kept ourselves awake in order not to wake up too early in the morning. Mostly it was I who talked, often of my former life, for it was essential to me to impress on one man, at least, the fact that in my own circle, I had once been an important and respected man. Or I told him of the worries and anxieties which now obsessed me, and it would have been better if I had paid more attention to Holz’s simple advice: “You want to crawl to your wife, Sommer,” he often warned me. “Don’t rely on your brains and some legal tricks, the others are better than you at that. I know how they can play about with simple people—and you’re only a simple fellow too, Sommer. The doctor will always get you tied up—and then it’ll be the Public Prosecutor’s turn! Agree to any conditions your wife makes, give up your property even, what’s the odds, only see that you get out of this hole! You don’t know yet what it’s like to be shut away for a long period. Write to her, Sommer, write to her immediately, tomorrow afternoon!”
So said Holz in his quiet even and toneless voice. Occasionally he would talk of himself. But never of his past life at liberty, of this I only found out that he was born and brought up in Hamburg. What his parents were, what he had learnt, what crimes (and they must have been serious crimes!) had earned him such a long gaol sentence, I do not know. I believe a warder once told me that Holz had formerly been a celebrated burglar. I can hardly believe it. He was so quiet, so simple, without any initiative or protest, I simply cannot credit him with sufficient energy for this dangerous calling, requiring as it does considerable presence of mind and an ability for making quick decisions. But of course it is always possible that his long stay in prison had completely changed him.
“I was six years in gaol without once being punished,” he told me on one occasion.
Simply as he said it, the words had a ring of pride. He liked best to talk of his time in prison. He told me about his work, he recounted in full detail how he had begun by weaving material for mattresses, and had progressed to shirt-material. Then he had been put on to knitting stockings on the “flat machine”—I could hardly imagine what a flat machine was, even after I discovered that there was also a “round machine” for knitting stockings.
Then came Holz’s best time in gaol; he became a washer-up in the kitchen. Here he had as much to eat as he wanted, was in the company of his comrades, and even got to see women at least once a day. These women came from the nearby women’s prison to fetch food. Despite all precautions, glances and notes were exchanged and they even managed to pass bread, sausage and margarine to the women. Holz assured me that he only did what all his companions among the kitchen-staff did, but when the affair came to light they put the entire blame on him, and he was taken out of the kitchen. Only his good conduct saved him from the punishment cells. A horrible year ensued: Holz had to pick oakum in a solitary cell—and at the mention of this task how very clearly I recalled Magda’s arrangement with the prison administration, and my journey to Hamburg. Eventually Holz, being considered not liable to escape, was put on to outside work, and the prison cell only saw him at bed-time, he worked outside the whole day through, in the open fields, or in the sawmill in winter-time, Holz liked to talk of all these simple things. He still knew every task that had been allotted to him; strands which had given him trouble in picking he could still describe with the same fresh anger he must have felt in his solitary cell.
But Holz’s speciality was his disquisitions on food. Since everybody was always hungry, they constantly talked about food, probably it was all they thought of. Talking of food was a kind of mania, it only made the pangs of our hunger worse, but we could never leave off. In this Holz was an absolute master. Not that he thought up any refined meals to make our mouths water, no, his descriptions were of a biblical plainness. The meals he described were simply the same as those a common labourer eats, they were the meals he got in the convict prison. His head, never used for deep thinking, was sufficiently clear for him to tell me of any slight change in the usually constant prison menu; he still knew the ups and downs of the bread ration; the number of potatoes a prisoner under punishment is entitled to at midday instead of bread, and the extra allocation of bread, sausage and cheese for overtime and land-workers. He still knew all the Christmas extras, and he was most eloquent when he described how a farmer, pleased at a good piece of mowing, had given the convict-party pieces of bread spread thick with “good butter” or dripping, and five cigarettes per man as well. Each experience of this kind had engraved itself deep in his memory, and even today his voice trembled as he described how his stomach had not been able to stand the unwonted rich food, and he had brought it all up again. Holz’s accounts of food were as simple as that, yet I always liked to hear them over and over again, they were so moving! But each time, it struck us that a convict got about twice as much to eat as an institution inmate.
“There, you can see,” Holz would say, “how they rob us! But what can you do? A donkey is there to carry turnips and get beaten, and we’re worse off than a donkey, because he is worth a few marks whereas with us, they’re glad when we’re dead.”
Holz would say such things without any reproach, without bitterness even. For him, they were the matter-of- fact evidences of the unalterable way of the world.
In the asylum, Holz enjoyed a good reputation, both among the keepers and the prisoners. Here too he had immediately been put on to outside work without any probationary period, he worked in a gravel pit, for a building contractor. There he came into contact with many “civilians,” and had all kinds of things given him. He always had a couple of matches to spare for a friend, or a little onion, and he was the much-envied possessor of a glass containing salt, and of nutmeg and pepper. With these, he beautified his water-soup. From an old sardine tin which he found, he made a grater by punching holes in the bottom with a nail, and with this he would grate parsley-roots, celery-roots, carrots, raw potatoes even, if his hunger was very keen. With all these trifles, which a man “outside” would take entirely for granted, he garnished his plain life, and brought a little joy into it, and always had something to look forward to. He never joined in any game, either because he could not play or did not want to. He never read a newspaper, and only listened to the lightest dance-music on the radio.
“That cheers me up!” he would say then. A little light would come into his eyes, and he would smile, a rare and touching smile. All in all, a modest courageous man—I am glad that I never seriously tried to find out about his crime, I do not want to blacken this picture.
50
These were the three companions with whom I shared the cell that first night, to whose heavy breathing I listened, while shame, remorse and anger shook my heart. Outside the window stood the night, sometimes I raised my head and saw a few stars twinkling; I read a poem about them once, how they have been looking down for thousands of years, with the same cool glitter, on human joy and human sorrow. At the time, it had not touched me, but now it did, and I wondered whether the stars had ever witnessed such a desperate, so foolishly-occasioned sorrow as that which had overtaken me. It seemed almost impossible. And as the night-hours slowly dragged on, one after the other, from chime to chime, towards the new morning, I thought more leniently of Magda and the cunning doctor, and I swore to myself once again that next time I would be shrewder and more truthful. I convinced myself that nothing was lost yet, and I imagined long conversations with the doctor, in which I displayed a rare wit and a charming candour.
Eventually—an hour or so before unlocking-time—I really fell asleep. In my dream I was in my home town, I went through its streets and alleys, I saw many friends and acquaintances but they did not see me and passed by me without a greeting. Eventually I saw Magda sitting on that bench that is associated with our earliest schoolday
