He looked candidly at me with his little eyes through rolls of fat, and said: “You can talk quite openly with me. I’m the soul of honour. I’m ‘stickum’.”
“What are you?”
“Stickum, that’s what we say here for close-mouthed. I don’t squeal, understand?”
“But I’ve really nothing to confess,” I assured him again.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” said the fat man comfortably. “Perhaps you’ll be lucky, and the examining magistrate’ll be of the same opinion as you and won’t commit you for trial.”
“But I was arrested by the Public Prosecutor himself.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” the fat man informed me. “First of all, tomorrow or the day after, they bring you up before the examining magistrate. He questions you, and if he decides in your favour, you’ll be free again.”
“Is that really true?” I ask excitedly. “I can still get free?”
“Of course you can. But it doesn’t often happen that way. Still, we’ll see.”
And again he stretched comfortably.
I was intoxicated by the prospect of possible freedom so near at hand. I stood up and thoughtfully paced to and fro in the cell. If Magda gave favourable evidence on my behalf I would get free. And she had to give favourable evidence on my behalf, I felt. And even if she was still furious with me, she could never say I had tried to murder her. That was something I had never wanted to do. Dimly I remembered having said something like “Tomorrow night I’ll come and kill you,” but that was only drunken babble. It didn’t mean anything.
“Listen,” said the fat man. “Don’t run up and down the cell like that. You give me the fidgets. Sit down quietly on that stool, but take the cushion off first, it’s my private cushion. You can’t lie down on your kip yet. The old man won’t bring you your straw-bag till tonight. God, how this stable gets on my nerves!” Then the fat man yawned heartily, let a terrible one go—I started with fright—groaned, “Ah, that’s better!” and fell asleep at once.
I do not want to go on recounting in such detail the first days of my remand period. They were so agonising that one night I got up softly, went over to the fat man’s locker and took the blade out of his safety razor. I wanted to cut my throat. But I could not pluck up the courage. I tentatively made a small cut in my wrist, which only bled a little, but it calmed me. The will to live conquered, and that same night I put the blade back in the razor.
On the whole, it was easier for me to get over my craving for alcohol than I had expected. I had not become a proper drunkard yet, I had given myself up to schnaps for a short time only, and had never seen white mice. I was greatly helped, during this weaning period, by the fact that on the third or fourth day I volunteered for work. I could not bear to sit brooding and inactive in my cell, nor could I stand the fat man’s company—his name, by the way, was Duftermann. I think I would have murdered him if I had been forced to spend twenty-four hours of every day in his company. He was nothing but an animal; a more flagrantly egotistic man I have never met. He had obtained for himself every privilege the law allows for prisoners awaiting trial—he had blankets and cushions on his hard straw-bag, a regular supply of tobacco, and food parcels, but he never gave a crumb away. In the first few days, when I did not have my own washing things in the cell, he forbade me even to use his comb. I was not once allowed to touch his mirror, and it was only unwillingly that he permitted me to use a sheet of his newspaper as toilet paper.
“No, no, Sommer,” he would say. “Here it’s ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Why should I start looking after you? What do you do for me? You only give me the fidgets.”
That was another point on which I was driven nearly frantic. Everything I did upset Duftermann. I was not allowed to walk up and down in the celclass="underline" if, in the night, I turned on my straw mattress, he complained about his sleep being disturbed: if I wanted to open the little window for a moment, he shouted that it was cold on his bald head, and so we had to go on squatting there in the heat and the stink. But he allowed himself everything. He greedily wolfed the food parcels which his wife brought for him twice a week, sat on the bucket six times a day, behaved like a pig, and snored so loudly at night that it kept me awake for hours on end, at the mercy of my gloomy thoughts. If ever I hated a man from the bottom of my heart it was Duftermann. In the long time of trouble ahead of me, I was to lie down with much rougher folk, with labourers, with tramps even—but none of them ever let themselves go, so flagrantly gave rein to all their instincts, as this Duftermann did. By profession he was merely a property-owner, the son of a rich long-dead father who had left him several large houses and other real estate. Up till now, Duftermann had spent his life administering this property, and in the course of administering it, he had met with the misfortune that brought him to prison and caused him to become my cell-mate. As he denied nothing to himself and everything to others, and as he claimed the right to do whatever he pleased, he had set fire to one of his houses, whose dilapidated condition had nettled him for some time past, so as to cover the cost of rebuilding by the insurance money. In this fire, a woman and her child had lost their lives.
Duftermann merely complained: “The damed fool! Couldn’t she run out in time like all the rest? No, the stupid idiot has to stuff some rubbish or other into a trunk first, and then the smoke makes it impossible for her to escape. How can I help it, if some old girl’s so stupid? The Public Prosecutor would like to make a rope out of it for me. But he doesn’t know Duftermann. I’ve engaged the best lawyers, and if everything goes wrong, I’ll have them give me Paragraph 51, be certified and live off my means in some nice little loony-bin.”
Duftermann quite openly admitted his guilt.
“Why should I tell lies? They caught me with the petrol can in my hand. There’s no point in denying it. Yes, if I were in your shoes I’d deny everything to my dying day. But like this—why I’m just certifiable!”
He roared with laughter.
“After all,” he continued in a tone of self-pity, “it was only my good nature made me do it. I’m just a good-natured fool. I couldn’t bear to see people going on living in such a tumbledown bug-ridden barrack of a place. I wanted to provide them with decent housing—and this is what my good nature gets me.”
In this way, Duftermann drove me to volunteer for work; and I could be sure of his biting scorn, when of an evening I returned to the cell from work, with weary bones but quite peaceful at heart. He would greet me something like this: “Ah, here comes the model boy. Well, did you work hard? Did you suck up to that swine of a governor? The Public Prosecutor will give you just as long in clink as if you’d stayed here quietly in your cell. It’s creepers like you who spoil the whole prison. Your sort make it bad for the rest of us, they’ll make all work compulsory. But you wait, I’ll get you yet.”
I hardly listened to his talk, and never addressed a word to the common fellow. Of course, this did not upset him in the least. He had the hide of a rhinoceros, and calmly went on talking whether I answered or not.
29
Well, I had volunteered for work. Splittstösser, the headwarder, issued me with a new blue jacket as my prison uniform, and with ten or twelve others I was taken into a yard, surrounded by high walls, where great piles of wood lay. Formerly we, too, had taken the firewood for our central heating—bought by the cord from the forestry people—to the prison, to have it chopped up. I had never given it a thought, who sawed and chopped my wood there. Now I myself stood for eight hours a day at the saw-bench, and opposite me stood an habitual burglar named Mordhorst, a man with many previous convictions. Together, for eight hours at a time, we pulled the two-handled saw through pinewood, beechwood and oak. A guard paced to and fro in the yard, watching to see that we did not do too much talking and too little work. Now I was sawing wood for the citizens of my native town, and this time it was Hölscher—the general merchant for whom we were working at the moment—who gave no thought to the fact that his old client Sommer was cutting his firewood for him. At first it disturbed me greatly that the fourth side of the yard was bounded by the district court building, and many windows looked down on me and my sawing arms in the blue prison clothes; but within a few days I had become accustomed to it and hardly turned my head when Mordhorst whispered: “The Public Prosecutor’s up at the window again, looking to see if we’re earning our keep. Saw slower, mate. When he’s looking, I’m not working.”