As far as she can see, only potatoes and herself, all alone: she needs to hoe the potatoes. She smiles, picks up her hoe, there’s the clink of a pebble, a weed falls, she hoes her own row.

Chapter 12

ENNO AND EMIL AFTER THE SHOCK

Little Enno Kluge had a much worse time of it than his “chum” Emil Borkhausen, whose wife, be she as she might, at least bundled him off to bed following the experiences of that night, even if she did then promptly rob him. The little gambler also got much more knocked about than that long, bony snitch. No, Enno had an especially bad time of it.

While Enno is trotting around the streets, timidly looking for his Tutti, Borkhausen has got up from his bed, gone to the kitchen, and savagely and broodingly eats his fill. Then Borkhausen finds a pack of cigarettes in the wardrobe, slips it in his pocket, and sits down at the table again, pondering gloomily, head in hand.

Which is how Otti finds him when she returns from the shops. Of course she sees right away that he’s helped himself to some food, and she knows he didn’t have any smokes on him and traces the theft to her wardrobe. Apprehensive as she is, she starts an argument right away. “Yes, that’s my darling, a man who eats my food and snitches my cigarettes! Give them back, I want them back right now. Or pay me for them. Give me some money, Emil!”

She waits to hear what he will say, but she’s pretty sure of her ground. The forty-eight marks are almost all spent, and there’s not much he can do about it.

And she can tell from his answer, nasty though it is, that he really doesn’t know anything about the money. She feels far superior to this man: she’s robbed him and the silly jerk hasn’t even noticed.

“Shut your face!” grunts Borkhausen, not even lifting his head out of his hands. “And get out of the room while you’re about it, or I’ll break every bone in your body!”

She calls back from the kitchen doorway, simply because she always has to have the last word, and because she feels so superior to him (although he does frighten her), “You should try to keep the SS from breaking all the bones in yours, jackass!”

Then she goes into the kitchen and takes her banishment out on the kids.

The man meanwhile sits in the parlor and thinks. He doesn’t remember much about what happened in the night, but the little he recalls will do for him. And he thinks that up there is the Rosenthal flat, which the Persickes have probably picked clean, and it was all there for him, for nights and nights. And it’s his own stupid fault it was fouled up.

No, it was Enno’s fault, Enno got started on the drink, Enno was drunk from the get-go. If it hadn’t been for Enno, he would have got a whole heap of stuff, clothes and linen; and dimly he remembers a radio. If he had Enno in front of him now, he would pulverize him, that wretched cowardly twerp who screwed up the whole thing!

A moment later, Borkhausen shrugs his shoulders again. Who is Enno, anyhow? A cowardly parasite who scrounges off women! No, the real one to blame is Baldur Persicke! That rat, that schoolkid of a Hitler Youth leader always intended to betray him. The job was rigged to produce a guilty party, so that they could help themselves to the booty at their leisure. That was a fine scheme on the part of that bespectacled cobra! How could he let himself be beaten by a snotnosed kid like that!

Borkhausen isn’t quite sure why he’s sitting in his room at home rather than in a detention cell in the Alex.* Something must have interfered with their plan. Dimly he remembers a couple of mysterious figures, but he was too stupefied then to register who they were and what their role was, and he has even less idea now.

But one thing he does know: he’s never going to pardon Baldur Persicke for this. He can creep as high as he likes up the ladder of Party favor, but Borkhausen is going to stay alert. Borkhausen has time. Borkhausen won’t forget. The louse—one day he’ll catch up with him, and then it’ll be his turn to grovel! And he’ll be groveling more abjectly than Borkhausen, and he’ll never get up out of it either. Betray a partner? No, that will never be forgiven or forgotten! All those fine items in the Rosenthal place, the suitcases and boxes and radio, they could all have been his!

Borkhausen goes on bitterly ruminating, always along the same lines, and in between times he sneaks out Otti’s silver hand mirror, a keepsake from a generous john, and examines and gingerly touches his face.

By this time little Enno Kluge, too, has discovered what his face looks like, in a mirror in the window of a dress shop. That has only served to frighten him even more, in fact it throws him into a blind panic. He doesn’t dare look anyone in the face, but he has the feeling everyone is staring at him. He pounds the back streets, his search for Tutti is getting more and more hopeless—it’s not just that he can’t remember where she lives, he has lost his own bearings.