. .’ I said hesitantly.

‘As someone taken into protective custody’, said the man, suddenly looking me full in the face, ‘you can cater for yourself, that is to say, you can have your lunch and evening meal brought in from a local hostelry.’ He looked at me again. Then he added quickly: ‘As long as you’ve got the money to pay for it.’

‘That I have!’ I cried, and produced my wallet. ‘Constable, see that this man has his meals fetched regularly from the Poor Knight on the market square.’ And to me: ‘Anything else?’

At that moment I really couldn’t think of anything else, or at least nothing that the clerk could have done for me. ‘Constable, take this man to his cell!’ Thank God, it was a clean cell, as I could just make out in the fading evening light, and it was also bug-free, as I discovered after the first night I spent there. I woke early, made my bed, and wrote my two letters. My lawyer I simply asked to visit me; the letter to my wife contained the same request but also a few other things, whatever I felt able to say under the circumstances. I could see her there before me; she was having a hard time of it right now, expecting a child, in fact she was expecting twins, as we knew, and she was in a lot of discomfort. And then I pictured myself driving away from the house, in this clapped-out car commandeered by the SA, while a sentry stayed behind outside her door. How would she cope with all this – in her condition? I was somewhat comforted by the thought that at least she need not fear for my life, since the good doctor would have passed on my message. And then my heart sank as I realized that there was no guarantee of this. Would the sentry let visitors through to see her? Wasn’t the whole point of the sentry to keep her isolated? And I could see her there before me, alone in the house with the boy, the telephone now cut off, with only our landlords downstairs, an elderly couple, to call on for help and advice. The Sponars! I suddenly remembered the hate-filled look that Mrs Sponar gave me as I went upstairs escorted by the SA men. A horrible feeling crept over me: did the Sponars have a hand in this dirty business? Then I remembered the Thursday afternoon, the little jokes that Mr von Salomon had made – but how could that possibly be? What interest could the Sponars have in doing me harm? On the contrary, they had every interest in helping me, because I had offered them more than anyone else had: a carefree old age! No, the Sponars would surely help my wife, in so far as strangers like them could really do anything to help. That encounter before morning communion on Good Friday had really been so distasteful – Suse would never be able to trust such people completely. But then again, now that I thought about it there was something reassuring in this encounter too: surely these old people couldn’t be so two-faced and so vicious as to come and ask our pardon with treachery in their hearts? Impossible! And they didn’t need to. No, it had to be that incorrigible schemer and hothead von Saloman who had landed me in this mess! ‘Conspiracy against the person of the Führer’ – that was just his kind of thing! But how did they get the idea that I was some sort of co-conspirator? They couldn’t just arrest every person that Mr von Saloman had visited lately, without further investigation, and take them all into protective custody as suspected co-conspirators! Whichever way I looked at it, there was something about it I couldn’t explain; and however much I tried to avoid it, I kept on seeing that look of hatred in Mrs Sponar’s eyes.

These thoughts kept on going round and round in my head, and so I was really pleased when the police constable finally unlocked the door and handed me my breakfast – a dry crust and a cup of watery chicory coffee. He took the letters I handed him, looked at me, then looked around the cell. His gaze came to rest on the bed, which had been made in regulation fashion and folded up against the wall. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve been inside’, he observed. ‘Only an old lag makes his bed like that.’

Unfortunately he was correct in his observation. In the course of my eventful life I had indeed inhabited a prison cell from time to time. But it still annoyed me a little that he had noticed. In the meantime I had become a famous writer, and the days of my youthful follies lay far in the past. I made no reply. He looked me in the face again and said: ‘Well then . . . I’ll look in again before lunch and see what you want.’ ‘Some sort of meat dish with soup and stewed fruit’, I said, ‘and a large glass of beer. And twenty cigarettes.’ (I had ordered the glass of beer – I actually don’t like beer at all – because beer always makes me feel nice and sleepy.