Anyway, the doctor kindly offered me his hand and said: “Well, we’ll have another talk. I’ll send for you. Goodnight, Herr Sommer.”
I was just about to go when the head-nurse asked: “Is Sommer to work, doctor?”
“Of course he’ll work!” cried the medical officer. “Then time won’t pass so slowly for him, and he won’t brood. You want to work, don’t you, you busy wood-cutter?”
I assured him that I had no keener wish. I had seen a lovely big garden outside the wall, perhaps I could be put to work in the nursery? I always liked gardening so much.
The doctor and his right-hand man looked at each other and then at me. They smiled rather thinly.
“No, in this early period we had better not let you work outside,” said the doctor gently. “We’ll have to get a bit better acquainted first …”
“Do you think I’d run away?” I cried indignantly. “But doctor, where could I run to, in these clothes, with no money, I wouldn’t get ten miles …”
“Ten miles would already be too much,” the doctor interrupted. “Well, nurse?”
“I think I’ll put him on to brush-making, we need a man there. Lexer can instruct him.”
“Lexer?” I interrupted the head-nurse, terrified. “I beg you, anyone but Lexer! If ever I hated a man, it is that disgusting yelling little beast! Everything inside me turns over with disgust, just at the sound of his voice.… Anything you like but, please, not Lexer!”
“Did you suffer from such violent antipathies outside, Sommer?” asked the medical officer softly. “You’ve hardly been twenty-four hours in the place and already you’ve conceived such a hatred of this harmless feeble-minded youngster.”
I was embarrassed, nonplussed, I, had made a mistake again.
“There are such sudden antipathies, doctor,” I said. “You see a man, you just hear a voice and …”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted me, and suddenly he looked tired and sad. “We’ll talk about all that later. Now, goodnight, Sommer!”
48
It was a defeat, an ignominious defeat, and nothing could gloss over the extent of the defeat in my mind. I was unmasked as a liar, I had symptoms of de-alcoholisation and suffered from sudden morbid antipathies. Perhaps I thought of escape. Powerless and despairing, I lay on my bed, I could have wept for shame and regret. So much thought out, so many precautions taken, and I fall into every trap like a stupid brainless youngster! And it’s not at all true, what they think of me, I cry desperately to myself. I really don’t think of escaping, I really have had no symptoms of de-alcoholisation, or only in the very first two or three days, and then only very slightly, and if I had lied a bit about my consumption of alcohol, it was not with the intention of deceiving the doctor. He came here with a preconceived and bad opinion of me, an opinion which did not accord with the facts, and it was a duty, an act of self-defence, for me to destroy this preconceived opinion by any means at my disposal.
But I could tell myself what I liked, the fact remained that I had suffered a heavy defeat, that in the eyes of doctor and head-keeper I was just a flighty little criminal who tried to wriggle out of the consequences of his guilt by hook or by crook.
“Guilt?” I thought. “What is this great guilt of mine? That little threat—Mordhorst told me that for uttering menaces one got three months at most! That’s nothing, one couldn’t count that! But they make a gigantic affair of it, they shove one in prison and in this asylum, they take the ‘Herr’ off my name Sommer, they give me cabbage-water for food, and they third-degree me as if I’d murdered my mother and was the lowest of human beings; I’m sure, if I could only be allowed to talk to Magda for five minutes, I could convince her; together we could confront that ridiculous prosecutor with the jutting underlip and starting eyes, and the fellow would have to stop proceedings against me immediately. But,” I suddenly, painfully thought, “but it’s Magda’s fault as well! If she had had a little love and loyalty, as partners in marriage should for each other, she would have applied for permission to visit me long ago, she would have moved heaven and hell to get me out of this death-house! Nothing of the kind! Not even a letter has she written me. But I know how it is: she’s hand in glove with the doctors. They tell her I’m well looked after here and have nothing hard to put up with, and that is enough for her, she doesn’t give me another thought. She has got what she wanted, she can do what she likes with my property—that’s the most important thing for her! But just wait, one of these days I’ll get out of this place by hook or by crook, and then you’ll see what I’m going to do.…” And in a wild rage I submerged myself in fantasies of revenge. I sold the business behind her back and I gloatingly imagined to myself how one morning she would arrive at the office and in her—in my place at the boss’s desk, the young proprietor of the rival concern is sitting, smiling at her ironically: “Well, Frau Sommer, come to buy a little something from me? Ten kilos of yellow Victoria peas, perhaps? A kilo of blue poppy-seeds for the Sunday cake?”
She would go red with shame and anger and desperation, and I, hidden in the big filing-cabinet, would see it all, with an exultant heart. Or I imagined how, after my release from this death-house, I would wander out into the wide world, how I would roam through foreign countries as a beggar and a tramp, and only eventually, unrecognisable to anyone, I would return to my native town.
There I would beg for a piece of bread at the door of my own house, but she would sternly refuse me. Then in the night I would hang myself from the plum tree in front of her window, with a note in my pocket to say who I was, and that I forgave her all the wrongs she had done me.… Tears of emotion at my unhappy lot came into my eyes, and these fantasies, childish as they were, did something to comfort my heart.
My companions had chatted together until it grew dark, two of them, that is—the third, an elderly man with a handsome sad face and a wonderfully-modelled high forehead, had pulled the blanket over his head immediately. Now they had all long since fallen asleep. I congratulated myself on such quiet, decent sleeping-companions. I observed that night that they had got each other to use the bucket only for the lesser business, they reserved the other function for the daytime. I felt a mild rush of gratitude towards the artful doctor who had transferred me to such improved sleeping-quarters. I was convinced that I had been put in among the most irreproachable and sanest men in the whole place. A few days passed before I found that the elderly man with the beautiful forehead and melancholy face, who bore the unusual name of Qual,* was a killer who had murdered his cousin for money in a most bestial way. Now, through all the torments he had undergone, first during long years in prison and then in this place, his mind was utterly confused. With him, in any case, his name was his fate, you could see that in his face.
For days on end he would remain silent and then from time to time he would talk in a high cheerful voice (yet almost toneless, and quite without resonance) of many things; of the parching Sun-god, of the glass house on Mont Blanc where the next Ice Age would be spent, and of horse-chestnuts and acorns which were becoming edible because of some fancied reversal of sap. By this means, the authorities would be in a position to give better food, at no cost at all (as with all of us, Qual’s thoughts, though confused, circled incessantly round the subject of food). At other times, Qual would fall silent again, irritable and quarrelsome, and then everybody kept out of his way. He had the reputation—probably quite unfounded—of being a cold-blooded murderer who would kill a man for a single word. I think this reputation was entirely unjustified.