His voice is rough and hoarse. The syllables march past, curt and clipped, and form up into companies of sentences. His speech is a military function, his gestures fictive rifle exercises.
Count Avalov believes in himself and his mission. He too can be understood as a victim of his times. The Czar has been murdered and Avalov feels compelled to represent the real Russia in the eyes of the world. He pulls on his costume as a personal demonstration against Lenin and Trotsky.
He is a brave man, no doubt, and no more dishonest to the world than he is to himself. He wishes to be a prop of the monarchy, and so offers himself as a theatrical prop.
He is an adventurer out of self-deception. He thinks of himself as a general and Machiavelli rolled into one. All he does is pin tin medals on people.
Berlin Börsen-Courier, 8 January 1922
* Köpenick-iad: a confidence trick, as when the cobbler Voigt got into a borrowed military uniform and occupied the town hall of Köpenick outside Berlin. The subject of Carl Zuckmayer’s enduringly popular tragicomedy of 1931, The Captain of Köpenick.
15. The Mother
Yesterday the nineteen-year-old labourer Franz Zagacki was sentenced to five years in prison. He had tried to kill his mother while she was peeling potatoes, first with an axe, then by asphyxiation, and finally by stabbing her. Then, supposing she was dead, he robbed her of a wallet in her petticoats containing two thousand two hundred marks, went to a tobacconist’s, paid his debts, bought cigarettes, invited his friends and his sweetheart who had helped him plan the deed to a cosy get-together in the flat of the apparently deceased woman, and went out to have himself a fun day. The mother though did not die, and the son was arrested and taken to prison for questioning.
Yesterday the mother stood in court and explained that she had forgiven her son. No sooner were the wounds healed that he had dealt her, than she was setting off to her son’s prison bringing preserves and other delicacies she had forgone. Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son, and if she had had the strength and if her lust for life had not prevailed when she was near death, then she would have remained quietly under the bedding in which he had tried to asphyxiate her, in order to spare him. What was her view of her child? she was asked. Nothing but the best. Oh, it wasn’t his fault, bad company had led him astray, it’s always bad company that’s to blame. She didn’t know anything about his girlfriend, he was impressionable, but when he was younger he had been a good boy.
The mother will now be able to visit her son regularly in prison. With trembling fingers she will pack up preserves for him for Christmas and the other holidays, she will scrimp and save for her son, and her old soul will weep for him and hope. And it will be exactly as though her son was not in prison at all, but at university or abroad somewhere, or in some other kind of place that is not easy to return from for professional or some other reasons.
The mother’s day is full of work and painstaking, sometimes dirty labour. But between each thing and the next, the scrubbing of the floorboards and the chopping of the kindling, there will be a brief, secretive folding of her hands. And each time she sits down to peel potatoes, as when the axe struck her, she will cry from pain; but stronger than her woe is her hope, stronger than her pain her faith, and slowly from her love of the child, like young leaves from fertile soil a kind of shy pride will sprout, without cause, she couldn’t say why, not based on qualities, but simply on the fact of this boy’s existence.
And each time she looks at the hatchet or thinks of it, a terrible day will loom up at her out of the past. And for all its terror it’s still weaker in outline and force than the other day, approaching, when her son will come home, upright, healed, and full of regret.
Full of regret? He has nothing to regret. The others are to blame, of course! Any moment the door will open, and he’ll walk in. And even though it’s five years, five lots of three hundred and sixty-five days, it could be any day.
Because the mother doesn’t stick to facts, she denies the solar calendar and the year.
Berliner Börsen-Courier, 25 April 1922
16. Rose Gentschow
Rose Gentschow is the daughter of a landowner near Danzig. Her father died of paralysis of the brain. Her mother is addicted to morphine, and is in an institution. Three sisters have taken the prescribed way into middle-class life that ends with marriage to a well-situated man. Rose Gentschow too could have followed that path. She was even prepared for it by the girls’ academy she attended until the age of sixteen. Then she became a secretary. A harmless event undergone by many girls on the path to material self-sufficiency left Rose Gentschow with a bad and painful illness. She was twenty-one at the time. Her mother gave her morphine to relieve her pain. She lost her job. Relatives supported her. Then she met a “friend”. He sent her out on the street. She stole from the flats of gentlemen she accosted in bars, abetted by her friend. Her habit was to slip opium into the glasses they drank from. One, Hemel, a businessman, died. She had slipped a little too much in his drink. He fell off his barstool and was dead. Rose was arrested.
Today she is thirty-three. She looks younger. Hers is the deceptive youth of women who are professionally young because they live off their looks; who have experienced nothing but passion which doesn’t always age, but sometimes keeps them young; whose life consists of alternating waves of ecstasy and unconsciousness; who drown anxieties, age and illness in intoxication, and forget them in the moment. Rose Gentschow has the beguiling expression of the incurable vice girl. It comes from the faraway sins of dreams. It goes into dreamy sins. Rose Gentschow has remained slender and light. She has never known the everyday worries of the middle class that make one fat and heavy. She lives in consuming passion. But also in consuming poverty. Sometimes she had to earn money to buy her beloved morphine. She sold herself so that she could afford to intoxicate herself.
On no fewer than fifteen occasions she has tried to escape her fate. Fifteen times she went on a detoxification cure. Fifteen times she lapsed back into morphine dependency. She would have extended her life and her method to an early grave, had Hemel had a stronger constitution. That he didn’t was blind chance. A stroke of fortune interrupted the activity of the lady poisoner. That’s how she’s referred to in the court reports. The one who is poisoned though is she. Her hands are thin, and her gestures awkward and embarrassed. She cries a lot. She tries to hide her face. Then she dries eyes and tears with a fist. The childish movement is charming. Little girls dry their tears with their fists.
She is facing three judges and six jurors. This is the composition of the new courts, following the ministerial decree of 24 January 1924. The jurors sit up alongside the judges. The jurors’ bench is empty. When Rose Gentschow speaks, she speaks to nine men. She looks at them all. Sometimes her look catches on one or other of them. Perhaps he seems kinder, better, more benevolent than the others. Then the controlling consciousness corrects the stalled look, and she goes back to watching all nine.
Her voice is thin and low. With all her self-control, tears are never far away. In spite of herself, a sob catches in her throat. Sometimes she is hoarse, creaky, as though speaking without vocal cords. She sounds choked, as though she kept her hand in front of each of her words.