“There—she’s such a greedy, jealous cat—you can see it by her nose. People who have such thin noses are always sour and don’t like seeing anybody else have anything. But you mustn’t take it to heart. She can’t help being crazy; she didn’t choose her nose herself. And what do you do otherwise?”
“Sell shoes.…”
“There, I know all about that; that’s also an aggravating business for young girls. There are nasty old men who, when they get the itch, run from one shoe shop to another just trying on shoes, and then push the young girls with their toes. Well, I suppose you know all about that, too.”
“Yes, there are people like that,” said Petra, “and we know them. And if we don’t know them, then we can see it in their faces, and no one wants to serve them. And some are still worse. They don’t only push, they talk as well, more vulgarly than any girl on the streets … And if you won’t stand for it, they complain that the assistants give bad service, and they get a real kick when the manager tells you off.… There’s no use defending yourself, they don’t believe you when you say that a fine gentleman has used such vulgar words.”
“I know, girlie,” said the old woman soothingly, for the memory of some of the insults she had suffered had become so vivid to Petra that she had spoken almost heatedly. “We know all about that! Do you think it’s different in Fruchtstrasse? Not a bit. If we haven’t got shoe shops there, we’ve got sweet shops and ice-cream parlors—the under-dog always gets it in the neck. But there won’t be any more shoes for you now that you’re in prison. Or will they take you back when you come out?”
“I’ve had nothing to do with shoes for a long time,” declared Petra. “Nearly a whole year. I’ve been living with a boy-friend, and it was today—no, yesterday midday—that we were to have been married.”
“You don’t say!” said the old woman with wonderment. “And just on a red-letter day like that the little poisonous toad has to go and queer everything by peaching on you? Now, tell me, girlie, what mischief have you really been getting up to, for them to shove you straight away into prison rig? They only do that with real jail-birds, because they think they might escape in ordinary clothes. But if you don’t want to tell me, all right then. I don’t like being taken in, anyway, and I can always see if you’re not telling the truth.”
And so it came about that Petra Ledig, between one and two in the morning, related to a completely unknown elderly woman the rather wretched story of the collapse of her hopes, and how she now stood once again alone in life, and really did not quite know the why or the wherefore.
The old woman listened to it all quite patiently, now nodding her head, now shaking it vigorously and saying: “Yes, I know,” and “That does happen,” or “We ought to tell that to God, but he’s got a bit fed up with his job in the last five years and he’s deaf in one ear.” But when Petra had finished and looked silently at the sick woman below her, or maybe just stared in front of her at all the rubbish she really only became aware of while telling her own story—she no longer understood why, how, for whom and where it all began. The old woman gently laid her hand on her arm and said: “My child—so you are called Petra and he always said ‘Peter’ to you?”
“Yes,” said Petra Ledig rather morosely.
“Then I shall also say ‘Peter’ to you. I’m Frau Krupass—Ma Krupass, they call me in Fruchtstrasse, and you must call me that, too.”
“Yes,” answered Petra.
“I believe what you have told me, and that’s more than the chief of police himself can say. And if what you’ve told me is true—and it is true, I can see it in your face—then today or tomorrow you’ll be out again. For what can they want from you? They can’t want anything! You’re healthy and you haven’t been on the streets, and your name’s displayed in the registry office, too—don’t forget to tell them that; the registry office always works with them.”
“Yes.”
“Well then, today or tomorrow you’ll be out and they’ll also find some things for you to wear from the welfare office—so you’ll be out—and what will you do then?”
Petra shrugged her shoulders uncertainly, but now she regarded the speaker with great attention.
“Yes, that’s the question. Nothing else counts. Thinking and fretting and regretting—that’s all bunk. What are you going to do when you get out—that’s the question!”
“Of course,” said Petra.
“From the looks of you, you ain’t the sort to gas yourself or jump into the canal; and then you want to have your baby, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do!” said Petra with determination.
“And what about the shoes?” inquired Ma Krupass. “Do you want to start that again?”
“I won’t get a job again,” said Petra. “I’ve got no references for the last year; I simply stopped going to my last job, without notice. All my papers are still there. I told you, it all happened so quickly with Wolf …”
“I know, I know,” said Frau Krupass. “But still, you’ll fetch your papers; papers are always handy. So there’s nothing more doing with the shoes, and even if there was, you wouldn’t be earning enough, and then the other business would just happen again, and you don’t want that just now, do you?”
“No, no,” said Petra quickly.
“No, of course not, I know. I was only just saying it. And now there’s one more thing, girlie. Do you know what? I shall call you girlie, and not Peter—Peter doesn’t seem to come easy to my tongue. Well now, there’s your boy-friend—how do things stand with him, girlie?”
“He hasn’t come for me.”
“That’s the sort he is; you are right there. And probably he never will. He’ll think he’ll get into trouble with his gambling if he makes too many inquiries for you with the police, and perhaps he also thinks that you’ve squealed on him.”
“Wolf would never think that!”
“All right, then he doesn’t think that. Very good,” said Frau Krupass submissively. “He may be just as fine a gentleman as you say; I don’t dispute it at all—and yet he doesn’t come. Men are all the same. Do you want to go and look for him, then?”
“No,” said Petra. “Not look for him …”
“And if he comes tomorrow to visit you?” The old woman shot a quick dark glance at the girl, who began to walk up and down, stopping sometimes as if she were listening for sounds in the prison; then she shook her head dejectedly and began walking up and down again. Stopping, she leaned her head against the wall and stood like that for a long time.
“This is how it is,” Frau Kraupass at last said knowingly. “The warder will knock on the door and say: ‘Ledig, come along—visitor!’ And then you will follow him in your slippers, dressed as you are now in your blue prison smock. And then you will come into a room. In the middle there’s a wooden barrier, and he’ll be standing on one side, smartly togged up, and you on the other in your prison dress, and in the middle a warder will be sitting and watching you. And then you will talk to each other and when the warder says: ‘Time’s up,’ he will go out again into the free air and you will go back again to your cell.”
Petra was watching the old woman tensely, with pale face. She moved her lips as if she wanted to say something, ask something, but she said nothing, asked nothing.
“Yes, jail-birdie,” Frau Krupass said suddenly, in a hard angry voice, “now just tell me what mischief have you been up to then, to bring you shuffling back to the cell? And what marvelous thing has he done, so that he can go out into the free air again?”
It was very quiet in the cell. At last Petra said painfully: “But it isn’t his fault.”
“I see,” said the old woman sneeringly. “It wasn’t his fault, I suppose, that you were always hungry and always had to wait up for him, and that he pawned your clothes, though if it hadn’t been for that you wouldn’t have come here at all. It wasn’t his fault, no! He wore the skin off his paws shuffling cards, he was always working night shift!”
Petra wanted to say something.
“Be quiet!” cried the old woman. “Let me tell you something. You’re crazy. He had a good time with you, and when he’d finished having a good time, he hopped it and thought: We’ll look for someone else now, she can go and look after herself—I like that, I must say! I tell you, it makes my gall rise. Haven’t you any self-respect left in your body, girl, to want to stand there in the visitors’ room like a primrose pot with a pink serviette and beam at him— just because he really comes to visit you? Is that marriage, I ask you? Is it comradeship? Is it even friendship? It’s pure wanting to sleep with him, I tell you. You ought to be ashamed, girl.”
Petra’s whole body trembled. She had never yet been so rudely awakened; she had never seen her
