Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada Read Free Book Online Page A

who would also like to find out what a cup of hot chocolate tasted like. Like the other women, she stockpiled supplies in the bushes, and when she discovered that these supplies were being plundered before the end of the working day, either by her fellow workers or by other people watching from a distance, she became even bolder. Hidden in the bushes, she waited until the tail end of the column had gone by. As soon as the last woman was out of sight, she hurried with her sack to a nearby house occupied by friends of hers, and left everything there, to be shared with them later. When it was time for the column to pass the spot again on its way back, she would get back into the bushes and then slip out, her empty sack over her arm, to rejoin the others.
    Her absence had not gone unnoticed by the other women, of course, and they made free with their barbed remarks and innuendos; but as they were all doing more or less the same thing themselves, she had nothing worse to fear. As for the Russian sentries who marched at the head and tail end of the column, they either saw nothing of what was going on or chose not to see. More likely the latter: they doubtless all knew what real hunger felt like, and they behaved magnanimously, even towards a hated nation that had let the wives and children of those sentries starve to death without mercy.
    In the evening, Alma would then sit with her husband, while their supper of milk soup heated up on the little makeshift stove, and the young wife would show him her latest acquisitions by candlelight — because the electricity had been cut off. They all ate tinned sardines on bread to start with, and then powdered chocolate was sprinkled into the milk soup. They didn’t just eat the food — they devoured it, gorging themselves until they were fit to burst, all of them, from the five-year-old Petta to the old and virtually immobilised grandmother. They didn’t care about overfilling their stomachs, or the effect this would have on their already disturbed night’s sleep, nor did they ever think about keeping something back for the next day. They’d said goodbye to all such thoughts during the years of sustained aerial bombing. They had become children again, who live only for today, without a thought for the morrow; but they had nothing of the innocence of children any more. They were uprooted, the pair of them, this herder of cows and this carrier of sacks; the past had slipped away from them, and their future was too uncertain to be worth troubling their minds about it. They drifted along aimlessly on the tide of life — what was the point of living, really?
    When Doll went to work with his young wife in the early morning, and when he hurried home on his own in the evening after tending the cows all day, his route took him past a large grey house with all its windows shut up, giving it a gloomy and forbidding air. On the door of the house was a very old brass plate, tarnished through neglect and stained with verdigris where the brass had been dented. Engraved on the plate were the words: ‘Dr. Wilhelm — Veterinarian’.
    When Doll and his wife walked past this gloomy house for the first time after the end of the war, she had said: ‘He’s topped himself, too — did you hear?’
    â€˜Yes …’, Doll had replied, in a tone of voice intended to indicate to his wife that he did not wish to pursue the subject.
    But Alma had ploughed on regardless, exclaiming angrily: ‘Well, I’m glad the old boy’s dead! If ever I hated anyone, it was him — in fact I hate him still …’
    â€˜Fine, fine’, Doll had interrupted. ‘He’s dead, let’s forget him. Don’t let’s talk about him again.’
    And they didn’t talk about him again. Whenever Dr. Doll approached the house, he fixed his gaze studiously on the other side of the street, while his wife kept on eyeing the house with a resentful or