Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada Read Free Book Online

man, let alone an entire family, and peacetime had not turned out quite how they had imagined, and the Nazis were up to their old tricks again, making sure they landed all the cushy jobs — it was all just hot air from start to finish, and it bored Doll stiff.
    Meanwhile the herd of cows was scattering far and wide, straying from the fields of vetch into the barley crop, while Doll charged about like a madman, trying to herd a thousand cows on his own, throwing stones at them, beating them with his stick, and finally sitting down on a stone, utterly exhausted and out of breath, nursing feelings of despair, anger, and dejection. At that very moment, a Russian horseman would often turn up to check on the work of the cowherds. The other cowherds, who had wisely positioned themselves while they chatted so that they could see the rider approaching from afar, were now busy about their work, while the exhausted Doll was given a dressing-down for being lazy. But he could never bring himself to behave like the others. This whole way of carrying on — only working when the people in charge were looking, and in actual fact doing nothing at all — he found abhorrent, and typical of the hated soldiering life, where of course ‘cushy numbers’ are highly prized.
    The only good thing about this cow-minding job was that when the cows had been driven in for the evening, cowherds and gasbags alike could stand in line with a jug — big or small, it could be any size — and they would get it filled to the brim with milk by the Ukrainian milkers. Thanks to this, the Doll family in those days could enjoy a bowl of soup for supper, which did them all good, young and old alike.
    When it came to this kind of thing — getting hold of supplies — Alma Doll’s efforts were a good deal more successful than her husband’s, and she was more ingenious, too. Along with thirty or forty other women and girls, she had been given the job of clearing the remaining supplies from a hut camp formerly occupied by the SS, and transferring them to a large shed by the railway line. It was quite a distance, and the sacks that the women had to carry were often filled with heavy goods, so that the weight was sometimes too much for them.
    What really made them angry, though, was the fact that all these preserved meats, these tins of butter, cheese, milk, and sardines, these cans of ground coffee, these packs of premium pressed leaf tea, these cartons filled with powdered chocolate (not to mention the racks of bottles containing wine and cognac and countless packs of tobacco goods) — what really made the women’s blood boil as they lugged all this stuff about was the thought that all this abundance had been withheld for years from starving women and children, including many children who had never tasted chocolate in their lives, only to be crammed into the greedy mouths of swaggering SS bully boys, who were directly responsible for much of Germany’s misfortune.
    Ever since the children, bottles of wine in hand, had got drunk outside the largest hotel in the town, most of the local population had taken a new line on property ownership: these were all goods to which they were actually entitled. The selfishness and greed of the merchants had kept these things from them — so it was only right that people should now take whatever they could get their hands on! It was a long way from the SS hut camp to the railway sheds, and the sacks were a heavy load to carry: every so often, a woman would disappear into the bushes that lined the path, and when she emerged again to join the tail end of the long, straggling column, having just now been at its head, her sack was only three-quarters full, and in the bushes was a nice little stash of supplies to be picked up that evening.
    Alma Doll was no more scrupulous than the other women; like most of them, she had children at home who were not getting enough fats in their diet, and