pipe, for I did not want to roll cigarettes in newspaper like the others, it always either blazed up or else it charred and tasted horrible. The bowl of my pipe was quite small, it only held enough tobacco for ten or twelve pulls; that was fine, I could have five smokes a day and still last the whole month. Not that first month though, for I was still foolish and let myself be talked out of some of it, and lent some which I never saw again. I learnt, too, the dread which all property-owners have of thieves; nothing in the cells was safe from them, however cleverly it might be hidden. Constantly the agonised cry echoed through the building: “They’ve pinched my tobacco!”
So we were obliged to carry all our belongings about with us in our pockets, even the spoon which was our only eating utensil, much to the annoyance of the head-keeper, who complained of all the bulges in our clothes. I got myself a small box in which I kept all my possessions, a little salt, perhaps a saved-up piece of bread, my pipe and tobacco. I always had this by me, in the mess-room and the lavatory, in bed, and even on my visits to the doctor. Later, the kindly Qual who was working in the carpenter’s shop, made me a little wooden box with a sliding lid and a handle of string, and would take nothing for it. Yes, now I was really enrolled, I belonged, and to tell the truth, after those first few weeks of getting used to the place, I did not feel too bad about it. I became accustomed to starvation, constant quarrels, bad air and boils, and many of my companions who were unresponsive and dull I just did not notice any more. I belonged; and yet I did not quite belong, I was only “provisionally admitted”, and later I was merely “pending report”. One day, my hearing would be held, I would serve my sentence for uttering threats, and then—I hope, I hope!—I would be able to return to freedom. What I was going to do there, I did not know. It seemed fairly certain to me that I would not go home to Magda, nor did I want to work in my old business again.
The time I spent in my cell, this constant isolation, had made me rather shy of my fellow-men, I preferred to be in the narrow room among my brushes, and I thought with aversion of the noisy crowded streets of my home town. I had the notion of going to some quiet village and spending the evening of my life there as an unknown, rapidly-ageing man, in a quiet room in which I could go on making brushes.…
I imagined something of the sort. Yes, a little joy had come back to me, an almost cosy contentment filled me—this time is best compared with the time I spent in the wood-yard of the remand prison. True, Mordhorst was lacking here but I did not really miss him. Mordhorst had always been driving on, complaining and agitating—and now I was all for peace. This place was horrible, with its filth and meanness and envy, but that was how it was, and what was the use of rebelling against it? We prisoners, we patients, were not worth it.
At the end of the second month I swapped my whole packet of fine-cut tobacco for a rimmed magnifying glass and now I could always light my pipe, even in my work-cell, provided the sun was shining. I imagined myself richer and happier than ever before when I leaned by my window and smoked my little pipe. I felt I had never enjoyed my life so deeply or been so happy as here in my warm cell. Perhaps the contentment of my cell-mate Holz, his gift for extracting pleasure from the slightest things, had already affected me.
52
In the quiet peacefulness of those days, my interviews with the doctor were the only disturbing thing, and their effect lasted but a few days at most, before I had become completely at ease again and returned to my calm and agreeable condition. On the whole the interviews did not go favourably for me, though none were as bad as that first one. Unfortunately it was quite impossible for me to behave naturally with him, in my dealings with him I never achieved that freedom and self-assurance which, outside, would have been so much a matter of course for me. I was always oppressed by a dark sense of guilt, as if I had at all costs to hide something from him. I was never quite free of my fear of his hidden cunning and trickery; at the most innocent question I was hunted by one thought: “What’s he trying to trip me with now?”
I never thought of him as the helpful doctor, only as the ally of the Public Prosecutor who in a confused and difficult moment had charged me with the attempted murder of my wife, and who would do anything to keep me inside these walls.
Whenever I really managed to overcome my feelings, and to tell the doctor what moved my heart, it unfailingly ended in disappointment. For instance, one day I told him quite freely about my changed plans for the future, how I was going to retire to some quiet village and just live by brush-making. I had expected to get the doctor’s approval of this plan, his praise even, and I was astonished and disappointed beyond measure when he vigorously shook his head and said: “Those are just fantasies, you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. You can’t live like that, and you don’t want to. You need your fellow-men, and above all, Sommer, you need a helping and guiding hand. No, that only comes from that quite unwarranted aversion of yours to your wife. Get the idea out of your head that your wife wants to harm you. You are the one who has wronged her and if your wife weren’t such a decent sort she would have every reason for being a bit spiteful towards you. But she hasn’t given a single unfavourable word of evidence against you, she tries to excuse you all the time! And here you tell me you don’t want to live and work with her any longer! What a fellow you are, Sommer! Can’t you see anything as it really is? Must you always invent some rigmarole?”
Naturally I was bewildered and indignant at this unwarranted attack; as Magda had not written me a line and never made any attempt to see me, I quite justifiably assumed that I was irksome to her, that she considered me dead and buried. And, as is the custom, she spoke no ill of the dead. But it was decent of me to keep quietly out of her way, to make no trouble for her, to leave her in full possession of my property. That the doctor refused to acknowledge my generosity, and instead assailed me with hard spiteful words, proved to me how prejudiced he was against me, and that made me keep my mouth shut all the tighter in future, made me still more reticent and shy. Really he was nothing but my enemy, a pitiless enemy who tried by all the means at his disposal to outwit me and who unscrupulously used his weight as head of the institution against me. The other prisoners had been right when they constantly warned me of him.
“Don’t trust that Stiebing! He’s friendly to your face, but behind your back he makes a report about you so you never get out of this hole alive!”
They were right.
During these few weeks, the doctor did not often send for me, and his demands on me did not become more frequent after he informed me that he had now been asked to prepare my report. Quite the reverse, in fact, another proof that he had a preconceived opinion about me, and did not want to find out anything further. In general, unless there was something specially urgent, the medical officer visited the institution twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday evening. But I was sent for much more rarely, hardly once a week. Of course I rather welcomed this, since every visit was, as I have said, a torture that took me days to recover from. But these rare summonses showed me, too, how lightly he took this report on which the fate of my whole life depended. Yet in itself, my case was a particularly interesting one for a psychiatrist. In education, I was head and shoulders above the other inmates, I had achieved something in my lifetime, I was a respected man—and now I was in this death-house. The medical officer must have been able to see there was more in me than in the others, I had more to lose, I was more sensitive, too, and more prone to suffering than these utterly dull, stupid fellows. But no, he treated me like any Tom, Dick or Harry, he was often quite rude to me, called me an incorrigible liar and romancer! I had every reason to mistrust him and to be on my guard. When he upbraided me for my lack of frankness, that was just one of his baseless charges, to which I remained completely silent.
53
A change in my relations to the doctor only came when he visited me in my cell one day at an unusual hour —early in the afternoon, in fact. I had just been smoking, which is forbidden in the work-cells, but he made no comment on the tobacco-laden atmosphere, even although he usually insisted on a strict observance of the regulations. That day, he was not wearing his light doctor’s overall, and was without his eternal shadow, the head- nurse. For a moment Dr Stiebing looked at my work and then asked absently: “Well, how are you getting on with the brush-making, Sommer?”
“Quite well, doctor,” I answered. “I think the work-inspector is pleased with me.”
He nodded, still rather absently, my good work did not seem to interest him much. He reached in his pocket, took out a silver cigarette case, and then he did something that completely astonished me, that almost bowled me
