friendship. I went towards her and sat down beside her. But she did not notice me. I wanted to touch her dress, I reached out my hand, but I could not grasp her dress. I tried to speak to her, and I did speak too, but my voice made no sound, I could not hear it, and Magda could not hear it either. Then I realised with a sharp terror that I was only a shadow wandering among the living, that I was dead. I was so terrified that I awoke—the head-nurse’s key was rattling in the lock and his voice cried “Get up!”
Yes, a new morning was beginning and now I was no longer a guest in the death-house, instead I was enrolled in the ranks with the others, like all of them I whiled my gloomy hours away here. They made no more fuss of me, they spoke to me, and then they began to quarrel with me, in the washroom they shoved me away from the basins, and sneered at me when I tried to keep my fingernails clean with a sharpened stick.
Look at him! What’s he doing that for? He’s as deep in the mud as we are!” And I made my little deals like them. I saved a slice of bread from my roaring hunger and traded it for a few crumbs of tobacco, and the first time I was cheated, there was very little tobacco, and a great deal of dried roseleaves mixed in it. Once, too—I will confess—I stole from our orderly Herbst two slices of bread thickly spread with butter, which he had hidden under his bolster. But I was so excited, that I neither enjoyed them, nor did they agree with me. That is the only thing I ever directly stole. I am a weak man, I know that now, but I am no thief. My fear is always greater than my appetite, and in that I am weak too.
And on this first day, when the order to “Fall in” sounded, I lined up with the others, enrolled among them, I had no advantage now over any of them. A keeper came and took me to a single cell in which there was no bed, only a table, a stool, and a number of different working materials, at which I stared with anxious and wondering eyes, convinced that such a clumsy man as I would never in my life be able to learn such strange work. I saw the ready-cut brush- and broom-holders, and hair bristles, the rice-straw and millet and fibre for the various kinds of brushes and brooms, which I was to learn to make. I saw rolls of thick and thin wire, and a knife—no, I would never learn it! Nobody came, I was shut in my cell—now that I had so urgently begged the doctor to deliver me from Lexer, was I to make brushes without my instructor? I tried it, I seized a few bristles and tried to fasten them in the holes which were already bored. But they were too few, and they fell out again. The next time I took more, but now it was too many and when I tried to force them into the holes, some broke and the others fell to the floor. I bent down and quickly tried to tidy up the mess, the key rattled again, and in sprang little Lexer with his discoloured fangs, and seized me by the breast and cried shrilly: “What did you do with that razor-blade? You’re not going to shit on me, Sommer!”
I tore myself away furiously and cried: “Keep your hands off me, I tell you! What have your lying tales got to do with me?”
The little scoundrel looked at me for a moment, astonished and silenced, then he laughed again in an ugly way and said: “All right, just as you like. But one day, I’m going to shit on you!” (However he has mostly let me alone since then, as I have said.) And suddenly changing, he asked: “Haven’t you got a chew of tobacco for me, Sommer, just a little one?”
I had none, and I told him so, and he said angrily: “There is nothing to be done with you. What did they want to shove a fellow like you in here for? Hang the wire up on the stand. No, not the thick wire, you ox, you’re supposed to make hand-brushes first, out of good bristle, they’re the easiest. Take the fine wire. Two hundred holes a day is your task for the first week, the work inspector will tell you, and if you don’t do it they put you in the cooler with the hard bed and make you get a move on! I can do a thousand holes a day, two thousand when I want to, but I don’t. Why should I? So the fat boys can make more out of us? We’d still have to go hungry! Look, first you pull the wire through the hole like this, so it makes a loop, and then you stick the bristles in, just as many as you can pick up with two fingers, that’s just right. And now you pull the loop tight, and there’s your bristles already fixed! That’s the whole knack, a kid could learn it in five minutes, and now you do it and show you can do as much as a kid!”
And while Lexer had been breathlessly declaiming all this in his shrill voice so that the spittle stood on his lips, I had been watching with astonishment how his dirty fingers with their bitten nails had drawn the fine wire through the hole with incredible dexterity, had seized just enough bristles to fit exactly into the hole without any space between, and finally had gently and quickly pulled the loop tight. As he did it, it really seemed childishly simple to me too. But what happened when I tried this simple thing myself? My wire would not go into the hole, it buckled instead of making a loop, and I picked up too few or too many bristles, and scattered them on the floor. Meantime Lexer was abusing me ceaselessly and he pushed me and nudged me and splashed me with his spittle, till I threw the brush down and cried again furiously: “Leave me alone, I tell you!”
So we worked the whole morning, I absolutely desperate over my clumsiness, and convinced I would never learn, and he all the time getting shriller, more triumphant, more overbearing. At the end of the morning we had finished only one single brush, of eighty holes, and it did not look right, as even I could see.
“Stick this on the rubbish-heap yourself, Sommer!” yelled Lexer. “Pull the plug on it before the work inspector gets to see it, or he’ll put you under punishment for wasting material! I’m not coming back into this stinking hole this afternoon. You know now how it’s supposed to be done, and if you don’t do it, that’s your look-out, you’ll have to answer for it. I’m not going to have anything to do with it!”
So after five hours I was free of my disgusting instructor and I could have saved myself that sudden outburst of antipathy that had been so ill-received by the doctor. But I was absolutely in despair over my brush-making that afternoon, and by evening I had not finished more than thirty-seven holes, and those badly done. That night for once I did not brood over myself and my adverse fate and Magda and the medical officer, but only about brush- making. But this must have been far more welcome to my head, for I fell asleep over it, and for the first time I had a fairly good night.
51
The days went by, one after another, and one day, before I had expected, I was a tolerable brush-maker. I had learned it, I made nailbrushes and hand-brushes and hair-brushes and dairy-brushes and windowsill-brushes. I could make brooms too, millet brooms and fine hair brooms. Eventually I learnt to make shaving-brushes and dusting-brushes and all kinds of paint-brushes. My fingers were now as skilled as Lexer’s, they took up just as many bristles as were necessary, neither more nor less, and the wire gave me no more trouble. Now when I met Lexer in the leisure-hour and he shouted at me in his shrill voice: “Well, Sommer, how many have you done?” I would answer: “Eight hundred holes,” or: “a thousand,” or even: “eleven hundred.”
Then Lexer would pull an angry face and yell: “Are you trying to suck up to the bosses? You won’t get any better grub than the rest of us, you arse-creeper!”
But I did not work so hard in order to curry favour, I worked for my own satisfaction. Work passed the time for me; before I expected it, the key would rattle and the keeper’s voice cried: “Lunch-time!”
The days, long as they sometimes seemed to be individually, went quickly enough: a week, a month had passed, I said to myself: “Now I’ve been here a month already, now two, now nearly three.…”
Now that my hands did the work of their own accord, now that I no longer had to think and worry about it all the time, my mind was free to reflect and brood on my own fate. But work imparted quite a different tone even to this brooding. Sometimes I stood for a while by the window and looked out over the country, in which they were already cutting the corn, then bringing it in, then ploughing the stubble, then mowing the hay. I had a good bright cell which, so they told me, kept warm even in winter. I looked out, and when my heart plagued and urged me to get out into freedom again, it was probably the work which made me say to myself: “Patience, it’ll all come right. For the time being, let’s get on with finishing this lot of washing-up brushes!”
Yes, I enjoyed my work. It was humble work that, sure enough, any child and almost any of my feeble- minded companions could have done, but there is always consolation in a job well done, however insignificant it may be.
I had no fear of the punishment-cells now, nor of the work inspector; he occasionally came into my cell to take the finished work away, and he never said a hard word to me, but often: “Good, good, Sommer.” Or perhaps: “You needn’t do more than your quota, Sommer, it’s not necessary.”
And once he gave me a crust with jam on. When my first month’s work was finished, I lined up with the other workers outside the glass box and drew the tobacco which had been bought out of my “wages” (four pfennigs a day, one mark a month), namely, one packet of fine-cut and one packet of shag. Half the shag I swapped for a little
