Every Man Dies Alone (75 page)
A double standard. Clemency is for Party members, not for members of the public.
In the Ministry of Justice, the appeals are again registered and numbered, and are given another stamp: TO THE PRISON ADMINISTRATION FOR ASSESSMENT.
The post conveys the appeals a third time, and for the third time they are numbered and logged. A secretary scrawls the same formulaic words on Anna and Otto Quangel’s appeals: “Conduct in custody was acceptable. No case for clemency. Return to Reich Ministry of Justice.”
Once again, a double standard: those who transgress against the prison rules, or even merely follow them, do not qualify for mercy; those others who have distinguished themselves by betraying, abusing, or snooping on a fellow prisoner just might.
In the Ministry of Justice, they register the returned appeals and stamped them REJECTED, and a pert young lady types from morning till night, Your appeal was declined… was declined… declined… declined… declined… all day and every day.
Then one day an official tells Otto Quangel, “Your appeal was declined.”
Quangel, who never made any appeal, doesn’t say anything. It’s not worth it.
But the post conveys the other rejection to the old people, and the village is abuzz with gossip: “The Heffkes got a letter from the Ministry of Justice.”
And even if the old couple keep adamantly, fearfully, shakingly silent, a mayor has ways of finding out the truth, and soon sorrow turns into humiliation for two old people…
The ways of clemency!
Chapter 68
ANNA QUANGEL’S MOST DIFFICULT DECISION
It was harder for Anna Quangel than it was for her husband: she was a woman. She longed for speech, kindness, a little tenderness—and now she was always alone, from morning till night, busy with the unpicking and rolling up of sackfuls of knotted string that were delivered to her cell. While she had been used to little in the way of intimacy and regard from her husband, even that little now struck her as paradise, and the presence of a mute Otto would have been a blessing under her present circumstances.
She cried a lot. The long, hard period in solitary had robbed her of the little strength that had suddenly come back to her when she had seen her Otto again and that had made her so brave and strong during the trial. She had been so cold and hungry in the chilly cell in solitary that the cold was still in her bones. Unlike her husband, she couldn’t improve her diet with dried peas, and she hadn’t learned, as he had, to divide the day into meaningful activities, a rhythm that allowed for change and something like enjoyment: an hour’s walking after work, or the pleasure in one’s own freshly washed body.
Anna Quangel had learned to listen at her cell window at night. But she didn’t just do it occasionally, she did it night after night. And she whispered, she talked at the window, she told her story, she kept asking after Otto, Otto Quangel… O God, did no one know where
Otto was, how he was doing, Otto Quangel, yes that’s right, an elderly foreman, but still fit and healthy, such and such a description, fifty-three years old—someone must know!
She didn’t notice, or she didn’t want to notice, that she bothered the others with her incessant questions, her lack of restraint. Everyone here had worries of his own.
“Can’t you shut up, #76, we’ve heard it all before!”
Or else, “Oh, it’s her and her Otto again, Otto this, Otto that!”
Or, bitterly, “If you don’t shut up, we’ll denounce you! Let someone else get a word in!”
When Anna Quangel finally crawled off to bed late at night, she couldn’t sleep for a long time, and she had trouble getting up the following morning. The guard told her off and threatened her with further punishment. She was late getting started on her work. She had to hurry, and then she undid whatever good her hurrying did when she thought she heard a noise in the corridor and got up to listen at the door—for half an hour, an hour. She, who had once been calm, kind, and motherly, was so transformed by her experience in solitary that she got on everyone’s nerves now. And because the guards always had trouble with her, they were rough with her, and she would start quarreling with them; she would claim she was given less food than the others, and of poorer quality, and the most work. Once or twice she had gotten so heated in the course of these arguments that she’d started screaming, just screaming her head off.
Then she would stop in surprise at herself. She thought about the distance she had come to be in this barren death cell. She remembered her home on Jablonski Strasse, which she would never see again, and she remembered her son Otto as he grew up, his childish babble, the first troubles at school, the little pale hand that reached up to her face to caress it—the child’s hand that had grown in her belly, that her blood had made into flesh, flesh now long since consigned to earth and forever lost to her. She thought of the nights that Trudel had lain in bed with her, whispering, the young, blooming body next to hers, talking for hours and hours about the strict husband in the bed across the way, about Ottochen and their prospects for the future. Trudel, of course, was gone as well.
And then she thought of her work with Otto, their silent struggle waged over the past two years. She remembered the Sundays sitting together in the parlor—she on the sofa, he on a chair, writing—formulating sentences together, sharing dreams of spectacular success. Lost and gone, all of it, lost and gone! Alone in her cell, facing certain
death, with no word of Otto, maybe never to see his face again—to die alone, to lie in her grave alone…
She paces back and forth in her cell for hours; it’s all more than she can bear. She neglects her work: the knotted twine lies there on the ground, she kicks it away impatiently, and when the guard comes in the evening, she has done nothing. There are harsh words for her, but she doesn’t listen—they can do what they want with her; why don’t they just put her to death right away, the sooner the better!
“Listen, I’m telling you,” the female guard says to her colleagues. “She’s going off the rails; you should keep a straitjacket ready. And look in on her regularly—she’s perfectly capable of stringing herself up. One day you’ll look in and see her swinging from a beam, and we’ll have nothing but trouble!”
But the guard is wrong: Anna Quangel is not thinking of hanging herself. What keeps her alive, what makes even this starkly reduced form of life seem livable to her, is the thought of Otto. She can’t just sneak away from here, she has to wait—perhaps there’ll be a message from him one day, perhaps they’ll even allow her to see him once more before she dies.
And then, one day in this endless succession of grim days, fortune seems to smile on her. A guard suddenly opens the door: “Come along, Quangel! You’ve got a visitor!”
Visitor? Who’s going to visit me here? I don’t have anyone who would visit me. It can only be Otto! It must be Otto! I can feel it, it’s Otto!
She glances at the warder; she would so like to ask her who the visitor is, but it’s the warder she always has arguments with, so she can’t ask her. She follows, trembling, not knowing where they’re going. She has forgotten that she must shortly die—all she knows is that she’s on her way to Otto, the only person in the whole world…
The warder hands #76 to a guard, and she is led into a room divided in two by steel bars. On the other side stands a man.
All joy leaves Anna Quangel when she sees who the man is. It isn’t Otto at all; it’s old Judge Fromm. There he is, looking at her with his blue eyes wreathed in wrinkles, and he says, “I wanted to see how you were, Frau Quangel.”
The guard on duty stands next to the bars. He looks at them both carefully, then turns away and goes over to the window.
“Quick!” whispers the judge, and pushes something through the bars to her.
Instinctively she takes it.
“Hide it!” he whispers.
And she hides the small paper-wrapped tube.
A note from Otto, she thinks, and her heart starts pounding again. She has gotten over her disappointment.
The guard has turned round and is looking at them from the window.
At last Anna finds words. She doesn’t say hello to the judge, she doesn’t thank him, she simply asks the only thing that still interests her in the world: “Judge, have you seen my Otto?”
The old gentleman moves his wise head this way and that. “Not recently,” he says. “But I’ve heard from friends that he’s doing well, very well. He’s keeping his chin up beautifully.”
He thinks for a moment, and adds, as though reluctantly, “I think I can greet you on his behalf.”
“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you very much.”
His words have triggered many sensations within her. If he hasn’t seen him, he can’t have a letter from him, either. But no, he spoke of friends; couldn’t these friends have conveyed a letter through him? And the words “He’s keeping his chin up beautifully” fill her with pride and happiness… And the greeting from him, the greeting passed through granite walls and iron bars, like a breath of spring! Oh lovely, lovely, lovely life!
“You’re not looking at all well, Frau Quangel,” says the old man.
“No?” she asks absently, a little surprised. “But I’m feeling well. Very well. Tell Otto. Please tell him so! Don’t forget to greet him from me. You will see him, won’t you?”
“I think so,” he says evasively. He is so scrupulous, the pedantic old gentleman. The least untruth spoken to this doomed woman pains him. She has no idea what ruses, what intrigues he has had recourse to in order to get permission to see her! He has had to pull all the strings he knows! In the eyes of the world, Anna Quangel is dead—and how can you visit the dead?
He doesn’t dare tell her that he will never see Otto Quangel again in this life, that he has no news of him, that he lied when he said Quangel sent her his regards, just to give this weak old woman a little courage. Sometimes it’s necessary to lie to the dying.
“Oh!” she suddenly says, with a little animation, and—lo!—her pale sunken cheeks show a little color. “Tell Otto when you see him that I think about him every day, every hour, and I’m sure we’ll see each other again before I die…”
The guard looks in momentary bewilderment at the elderly woman who’s speaking like a besotted little girl. Old straw burns fiercest! he thinks to himself, and goes back to the window.
She fails to notice, and continues feverishly, “And tell Otto I have a nice cell all to myself. I’m doing fine. I’m always thinking of him, and that makes me happy. I know nothing can part us, not walls, not bars. I’m with him, every hour of the day and night. Tell him that!”
She’s lying, oh, how she’s lying, just to be able to say something good to her Otto! She wants to give him ease, ease that she hasn’t felt for a moment, not since she came into this building.
The judge glances across at the guard, who is staring out the window. He whispers, “Look after the thing I gave you!” because Frau Quangel looks so distracted, as if she’s forgotten everything in the world.
“Yes, I will, Judge.” And then, quietly, “What is it?”
And he, still more quietly, “Poison. Your husband has his.”
She nods.
The official at the window turns round. He warns them, “No whispering in here, otherwise that’s it. Anyway,” he consults his watch, “the visit’s over in a minute and a half.”
“Yes,” she says pensively. “Yes,” and suddenly she knows what to say. She asks, “And do you think Otto will travel anywhere—before his big trip? What’s your sense?”
Her face is full of such agonized unrest, even the thick-witted guard realizes that this is a conversation about something else. For an instant he thinks about stepping in, but then he looks at the aging woman and the gentleman with the white goatee, who, according to the form, is a judge—and the guard has a change of heart and looks out the window again.
“Well, it’s hard to say,” replies the judge cagily. “Travel’s a complicated business nowadays.” And then, very quickly, in a whisper, “Wait till the very last minute, and maybe you’ll see him one last time. All right?”
She nods once, twice.
“Yes,” she says aloud. “Yes, that’s probably the way to do it.”
And then they stand facing each other in silence, each suddenly feeling there is nothing more to say. Over. Done.
“Well, I think I’d best be going,” says the old judge.
“Yes,” she whispers back, “I think it’s time.”
And suddenly—the guard has turned round again, and with watch in hand gives them both a warning look—Frau Quangel is overcome.
She presses her body against the bars, and with her head between the bars, she whispers, “Please—maybe you’re the last decent person I’ll see in this world. Please, Judge, would you give me a kiss. I’ll shut my eyes, I’ll imagine it’s Otto…”
Man-crazy, thinks the guard. About to be executed, and still only one thing on her mind. An old biddy like that…
But the old judge says with a mild, friendly voice, “Don’t be afraid, child, there’s nothing to be afraid of…”
And his old thin lips gently brush her dry, cracked mouth.
“Don’t be afraid, child. You have peace with you…”
“I know,” she whispers. “Thank you very much.”