Every Man Dies Alone (53 page)

The boy is so preoccupied with filling his belly that he hasn’t even noticed that the hoe has stopped its work in the field. He gives a start when the woman draws up in front of him, and he stares at her with big blue eyes under a thatch of matted blond hair. Even though he’s been caught red-handed and he can’t run away, the boy doesn’t look fearful or guilty; there is something challenging, almost taunting in his eye.

In the last few months in the village, Frau Kluge has gotten a little used to these children: the bombing raids on Berlin had intensified, and the populace was called upon to send their children out into the countryside. The provinces are inundated with these Berlin kids. It’s a curious thing; some of these kids can’t adjust to the quiet of rural life. Here they have peace and quiet, better food, undisturbed nights, but they can’t stand it, they have to go back into the metropolis. And so they set off: barefoot, begging for scraps of food, with no money, hounded by rural constables, they make their way resolutely back
into the city that almost every night is ablaze. Picked up and returned to their rural communities, they give themselves a little time to put some flesh on their bones, and then run away back home again.

This present specimen with the challenging eye who was eating Eva’s breakfast had probably been on the road for quite some time. She couldn’t remember ever having seen a figure quite as filthy and ragged as this. There were straws in his hair, and she felt she could have planted carrots in his ears.

“Well, is it good?” asked Frau Kluge.

“Sure!” he said, and the one word was enough to confirm his Berlin origins.

He looked at her. “Are you going to beat me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Go on eating. I can miss breakfast once in a way, and you’re really hungry.”

“Sure!” he said. And then: “Are you going to let me go?”

“I might,” she replied. “But maybe you’ll not mind if I wash you first, and sort out your clothes a little bit. Maybe I might find a decent pair of pants for you.”

“Oh, never mind that!” he said, dismissively. “I’ll only sell them off when I’m desperate. You’d be surprised at all I’ve sold off in the past year on the road! At least fifteen pairs of pants! And ten pairs of shoes!”

He looked at her proudly.

“Why are you telling me that?” she asked. “It would have been more in your interest to take the pants and not say anything.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe because you didn’t bawl me out for sneaking your breakfast. I don’t like being bawled out.”

“So you’ve been on the road for twelve months?”

“That was a stretch. I had a job in the winter. Working for a publican in some burg. I fed the pigs and washed the beer glasses, I did all sorts. It wasn’t a bad time,” he said reflectively. “Funny guy, the publican. Always drunk, but he was on the level, talking to me as if I was no different to him, same age and all. That’s where I learned to drink and smoke. D’you like schnapps yourself?”

For now Frau Kluge passed over the question whether drinking schnapps was advisable for fourteen-year-olds.

“But you ran away from there too? Are you going back to Berlin?”

“Nah,” said the boy. “I’m not going back to my folks anymore. They’re too common for me.”

“But your parents will be worried about you—they don’t even know where you are!”

“Them worry! They’re pleased to be rid of me!”

“What does your father do?”

“Him? He’s a bit of everything: a spy and a stoolie, and he does a bit of stealing on the side. If he finds anything worth stealing. Only, he’s a bit of a fool, and he doesn’t often find anything.”

“I see,” said Frau Kluge, and her voice sounded a little less gentle after these revelations. “And what does your mother say?”

“My mother? What would she ever say? She’s just a hoor!”

Whap!
In spite of her guarantees, he had got his slap.

“You should be ashamed to talk about your mother like that! Shame on you!”

The boy, not really changing his expression, rubbed his cheek.

“I felt that,” he said. “I don’t want any more like that, thank you very much.”

“You shouldn’t talk about your mother like that! Do you understand?” she asked angrily.

“Why not?” he asked, and leaned back. He blinked contentedly at his hostess, perfectly replete now. “Why wouldn’t I! When that’s what she is. She says so herself. ‘If I didn’t go out on the game,’ she often used to say, ‘then you’d all starve!’ There’s five of us, see, all with different fathers. Mine is supposed to have an estate in Pomerania. I was going to look him up. He must be a queer fish—he’s called Kuno-Dieter. There can’t be that many with such a silly name, so I’m sure I’ll catch up with him in the end…”

“Kuno-Dieter,” said Frau Kluge. “So your name is Kuno-Dieter as well?”

“Just Kuno will do; you can shove the Dieter!”

“All right then, Kuno, where were you evacuated to? What’s the name of the village where you got off the train?”

“I’m not an evacuee! I just ran away!”

He was lying on his side now, his dirty cheek propped on an equally dirty fist. He blinked at her sleepily, all set for a little gossip. “I’ll tell you what happened. My so-called father, it was over a year ago now, he cheated me of fifty marks, and on top of that he gave me a whipping. So I get together a few friends, which is to say they weren’t really friends, just kids, you know, and we cornered him and gave him a bit of a hiding. That was good for him; it taught him that it’s not always the big ones that can do the little ones! And then we stole the money out of his pocket, too. I don’t remember how much it was, the big kids divvied it up among themselves. All I got was a twenty, and then they said to me, You’d better scram now, your old
man will murder you or stick you in a juvenile home. Get out in the countryside and lay low with the farmers. And so I got out in the country and hid out with the farmers. And I’ve led a pretty nice life ever since, I’ll say!”

He stopped and looked at her.

She looked at him silently. She was thinking of Karlemann. This boy was three years younger than Karlemann and heading the same way—no love, no belief, no ambition, only thinking of himself.

She asked, “And what do you think’s going to become of you, Kuno?” And she added, “Are you planning to join the SA one day, or the SS?”

And he, stretched out: “Those guys? Not likely! They’re even worse than my old man! Just shouting and barking orders all the time! No, thanks all the same, that’s not where I’m headed.”

“But maybe you’d enjoy ordering other people around?”

“Why would I? No, I’m not like that. You know—what’s your name?”

“Eva—Eva Kluge.”

“You know, Eva, what I’d really enjoy would be cars. I’d like to know everything there is to know about cars, how the engine runs, and what the carburetor does and the ignition—no, not what it does, I sort of half know that already, but why… I’d like to know all that, except I don’t think I have the brains. When I was little they beat me about the head so much that I think it’s gone soft. I can’t even write properly!”

“But you don’t look as stupid as all that! I’m sure you can pick it up, the writing, and later on the engines.”

“You mean learn it? Like at school? Naah, I’m too old for that. I’ve had a couple of girlfriends already.”

She shuddered. But she came back pluckily, “Do you think one of your engineers or technicians has ever finished learning? They have to keep on learning, at the university or in evening classes.”

“I know! I know all that! That’s up on the billboards. Evening courses for advanced electrotechnicians”—suddenly his German was rather fluent—”the foundations of electronics.”

“Well then!” exclaimed Eva. “And you think you’re too old for that stuff! You don’t want to go to school any more? Do you want to be a bum all your life, washing dishes and chopping wood to get through the winter? That’s a nice life, and I wish you joy of it!”

He had opened his eyes wide, and looked at her questioningly, but also suspiciously.

“Are you saying I should go back to my people, and go to school in Berlin? Or do you want to hand me over to welfare?”

“Neither one. I want you to stay with me. And then I want to teach you myself, with a friend of mine.”

He remained suspicious. “And what do you get for doing that? I’d cost you a packet, what with food and clothes and books and everything.”

“I don’t know whether you’ll understand, Kuno. I used to have a husband and two sons, but I lost them all. I have a boyfriend now, but otherwise I’m all alone.”

“You can still have a baby!”

She blushed; the middle-aged woman blushed under the eye of the fourteen year-old boy.

“No, I can’t have any more babies,” she said firmly. “But it would make me happy if you made something of yourself, an auto engineer or an airplane designer or something. It would make me happy if I was able to make something of a boy like you.”

“I suppose you think I’m a poor bastard.”

“You know you’ve not got much going for you at the moment,

Kuno!”

“You’re right. Yeah, you’ve got a point, I guess.”

“And that’s okay with you?”

“Well, not really, but…”

“But what? Wouldn’t you want to come and live with me?”

“Sure I would, but…”

“What do you mean,
but?”

“I think you’d have enough of me pretty quickly, and I don’t want to be sent away—I’d rather leave by myself.”

“You can leave whenever you want, I’m not going to stop you.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Yes, that’s a promise, Kuno. You’re free to come and go as you please.”

“But, if I’m with you, then I’ll have to be properly registered, and then my folks will find out where I am. They wouldn’t let me stay with you another day.”

“If your home is the way you say it is, no one is going to make you go back. Maybe I’ll be made your official guardian, and then you’ll be my boy…”

For a moment they looked at one another. She thought she could make out a distant gleam in that indifferent blue gaze. But then he said—dropping his head on his arm, and shutting his eyes again—“All right then. I’m going to sleep now. You go back to your ‘taters.”

“But, Kuno,” she cried. “You haven’t answered my question!”

“Must I?” he said sleepily. “You can’t make me.”

She looked down at him for a while musingly. Then, with a faint smile on her lips, she went back to her work.

She hoed, but she was hoeing mechanically now. Twice she caught herself about to decapitate a potato. Watch what you’re doing, Eva! she said crossly to herself.

But it didn’t help much. She thought maybe it was for the best if her scheme didn’t come to anything. How much labor and love she had invested in Karlemann, who had been an unspoiled child—and what had happened to that? And now she wanted to take a fourteen-year-old layabout, who had a thoroughly jaundiced view of life and mankind, and transform him? Who did she think she was? Anyway, Kienschaper would never agree to it…

She looked round at the sleeping boy. But the sleeping boy was gone, and all that was left were her things in the shade, by the edge of the forest.

Well, have it your own way, she thought. He’s made the decision for me. Run off! Good riddance!

And she went back to chopping angrily at the weeds.

Just a moment later she caught sight of Kuno-Dieter at the other end of the row, busily uprooting weeds and stacking them in piles along the edge of the field. She clambered over the furrows to him.

“Woken up already?” she asked.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I’m all confused because of you. I need to think!”

“Then think! But don’t think you have to work for my sake!”

“For your sake!” It was impossible to describe the contempt bundled into those words. “I’m pulling out weeds because it helps me think, and because I happen to enjoy it. Honestly! On your account! You mean in return for the sandwiches? Are you kidding!”

Once again, Frau Kluge went back to her work with a gentle smile playing about her lips. Whatever he might say, and even if he didn’t know it himself, he was doing it for her. Now she no longer doubted that he would leave with her at noon, and from that moment on, all the urgent, warning voices in her head lost their influence.

She stopped work a little earlier than usual. She went back over to the boy and said, “Okay, I’m going back for lunch now. If you want, you can come with me, Kuno.”

He pulled out a couple more weeds and then looked at the patch he had cleared. “I’ve done quite a bit,” he said with satisfaction. “Of course I’ve only done the worst of the weeds, you’ll need to go after the little ones with the hoe, but I figure it’ll be easier for you.”

“That’s right,” she said. “You take out the big weeds, I’m sure I can manage the little ones.”

He gave her another sidelong look, and she noticed that those blue eyes could also take on a roguish expression.

“Are you implying something?” he inquired.

“Whatever you think,” she said. “Not necessarily.”

“Well, huh!”

On the way back, she stopped by a swiftly flowing little stream.

“You know, Kuno, I don’t want to take you back into the village looking the way you do,” she said.

At once a furrow appeared in his brow, and he asked suspiciously, “I expect you’re ashamed to be seen with me?”

“Of course, if you want, you can come just as you are,” she said. “But if you plan on living in the village for any length of time, you could be here five years and always be spic and span, but the farmers won’t ever forget what you looked like when they first clapped eyes on you. Like a pig, they’ll say in ten years’ time. Like a dosser.”

“You’re right,” he said. “That’s just what they’re like. Well, you hurry off and get some stuff, and I’ll start scrubbing myself.”

“I’ll bring soap and a brush,” she called over her shoulder, and hastened off into the village.

Later that day, much later—in the evening, by which time they had had their first meal together, Eva, the white-haired Kienschaper, and an almost unrecognizable Kuno-Dieter—later, then, Eva said, “Tonight you’ll sleep in the hayloft, Kuno. Starting tomorrow I’m going to have the little spare bedroom, they just need to clear the stuff out of it so you can move in. I’ll make it nice for you. I’ve got a bed and a dresser.”