As you see, nothing turns out the way you expect it to!’

Having thus entrusted our collective future to pure chance, I got started on the work of moving house – which proved quite entertaining for me and our boy. The one unpleasant moment for me came when I knocked on the Sponars’ door downstairs and went in with a receipt and a wad of notes in my hand to pay the rent and the annuity in advance for the next quarter. He could not conceal his agitation, and was almost shaking as he darted about looking for pen and ink. He normally signed his name with a flourish, but now he could barely manage a scrawl. The queen, meanwhile, sat by the window, bolt upright and stiff as a ramrod, and she was back at her lace-making again, the wooden bobbins clacking away balefully. Her dark eyes darted restlessly back and forth between her husband and me, and suddenly she laid aside the bobbins, reached out her hand and said imperiously to her husband: ‘Sponar, let me see that!’

He responded with alacrity, she counted the notes, read and reread what was written on the receipt, handed it to me between the tips of two fingers, and said spitefully: ‘But the furniture and all the other things stay here, as a security for our claims! From now on nothing more is to be removed!’ I could have taken issue with her on that, but for one thing we already had all our essential belongings loaded into the car, which was parked outside the garden gate – I had put off this unpleasant parting visit until the last moment, when Suse and the boy were already sitting in the car. And for another thing, I had only just been hauled over the coals for my precipitate actions, and the effects of such a drubbing lasted for a few hours, even with me. So I moved not a muscle in my face – the mark of supreme self-control in moments of dire peril, as all the adventure stories tell us – and walked to the door without a word. The queen called after me in a deep, malevolent voice: ‘And tell your wife I hope all goes well with the birth!’ Coming from her, it sounded so malicious and hateful that for two pins I would have turned round and strangled the evil woman with my bare hands.

But I controlled myself again, and focused on getting out of there as quickly as I could so as not to have to listen to any more. Breathing a sigh of relief, I climbed into the car with my loved ones and called to the driver: ‘Go! Go!’ I was afraid they might come running out after me. My wife asked anxiously: ‘Was there a problem? You look so pale!’

‘No’, I replied, ‘it all went fine. But let’s not think about any of this any more.’ And as we took our leave I gazed out at the village as we drove through, and when we passed the house with the sign ‘Karl Gröschke – Building Contractor’ I pointed it out to Suse and showed her what an ugly house it was: the misbegotten brainchild of a country builder with pretentions, and a blot on the sandy landscape. And I began to rhapsodize about the beautiful buildings one sees in southern Germany, where even the humblest dwelling has something of beauty in it, be it only in the way its form is structured and articulated; and where even the simplest woodcutter has something of the artist in him, be it only in the way he carves a wooden spoon with his penknife. Warming to my theme, I soon forgot the little village of Berkenbrück and its inhabitants, and then we were in Berlin and arriving at the Stössinger guesthouse, at which point our lives entered a new and interesting phase, and all our troubles – for now – faded somewhat into the background. We had stayed at the guesthouse once before, in a quiet, tree-lined street in the old west end of the city, but only for a short time on that occasion. But we had enjoyed our stay. It was a very elegant guesthouse, but quite small – it won’t have had more than fifteen or twenty rooms at most. The proprietor50 was an elderly and very shrewd Jewish lady, whom my wife and I came to regard highly. She was very precise in money matters, and her bills were not cheap. But she knew how to keep the business side and the personal side quite separate, and while she was the guesthouse proprietor, she was always the perfect lady. Actually, the term ‘lady’ is somewhat misleading: she was a cultivated and very motherly woman, who was always on hand to offer help and advice. With her motley international clientele she encountered every kind of peculiar and bizarre behaviour, but had learned to smile and turn a blind eye. No doubt she had her fair share of shady customers staying under her roof, international con men at large, but she wasn’t bothered, just as long as they didn’t play the fool in her house and paid their bills on time. But she would not tolerate any kind of smuttiness, such as bringing women of dubious character into the house, or flirting with the very pretty housemaids. If that happened, the eyes of this little old rotund Jewish woman would flash, and even the most well-heeled guest would get his marching orders there and then. If the odd guest came home drunk once in a while and kicked up a racket in the small hours, she would dismiss it with a smile. But when it came to cleanliness she was remorseless, both towards her guests and her maids, who were constantly cleaning the huge rooms from top to bottom.

It was of course absolutely typical of the writer Hans Fallada that five minutes after the Nazis had seized power he should have sought out a Jewish international guesthouse – of all things – as his place of residence and gaily started sending out his letters from there. I really was naive to the point of stupidity! For one thing, my application for membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature51 was pending at the time, and our future livelihood depended on the outcome. The fact was that any writer whose application had been rejected was immediately banned from publishing anything at all in Germany, either in book form or in a newspaper or magazine. So I had every reason to be cautious, since I was already quite compromised, as I have said. But caution was the last thing on my mind.