A Small Circus by Hans Fallada

Author:Hans Fallada
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

5

Another Creak

I

Thiel wasn’t able to sleep by day in his garret. Even though he lay down naked on his pile of rugs in the corner, the sweat was breaking out of him in streams. And then there was the stench from the toilet next door, worse than ever.

He was shattered. This waiting around was exhausting. No one came, but he heard thousands, tens of thousands, every hour. They came through the sleeping, restless, creaking, unlit house, creeping here, creeping there, laughing with big white faces lit up by the street lamps, or lurking in corners, perfectly still, their faces in the shade.

These nights robbed him of his sleep. When he heard the flush next door, he felt tempted to get up, bang on the door, tear open the dormer window, yell out into the street: This is the Stolpe Bomber! Ten thousand marks for the first man up the stairs!

Late in the evening—the typesetting machines had stopped rattling and the building was getting quieter—he had suddenly fallen into a dead sleep.

Now he has the feeling of having been startled awake. He sits up and listens.

It’s completely dark, and the building is quiet.

He strikes a match and looks at his watch: almost midnight.

He pulls on a pair of trousers, and on the chair by the door finds the plate of food left him by Padberg, and a bottle of Moselle.

So it seems Padberg has been by and not woken him, the wretch. Another twenty-four hours in which he won’t get to speak to a soul.

Thiel eats hastily and keeps listening at intervals. The house seems alive, waiting for him with all its rooms, the machine rooms still filled with the movements of people who are permitted to live, whereas he wanders around like a ghost.

Then he feels his way down the steps into the garden.

First the garden, the air, the stars, the green. He’s brought his Moselle with him, and drinks it there, on a spot of muddied lawn.

Then he gets up again—he will remember later that he felt particularly glad and alert and cheerful—and goes into the machine room. There in a lean-to are a couple of shower stalls. He gets under one of them and showers.

Now he feels great. He picks a hooked wire off a nail and teases open the drawer of a desk. That’s where the master mechanic keeps all kinds of personal junk, including cigarettes, so he helps himself and lights up, even though he has some of his own.

Who cares if the master mechanic rants and raves a bit if there are some missing, they are all comrades here. Let them suspect one another, a little suspicion within the Party will keep the dialectic from going stale.

But actually it’s not about cigarettes. That’s not why he forced the lock. The master mechanic keeps a supply of dirty postcards as well. God knows what he does with them, sells them to his colleagues, or keeps them for his own delight if he’s an unhappily married man.

At any rate, there’s a fresh bunch of them tonight, as Thiel sees by the light of another match.

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