Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada Read Free Book Online

of festivities each more splendid than the other, hundreds of people with whom it was glorious to talk, beautiful women, girls who were so bewitchingly young that a thrill went down one’s spine just to look at them …
    And wasn’t he himself young, really? He was five-and-twenty; what had happened didn’t count, a mere waiting around. He was young, life was young; pick and taste the fruit. Stop, please stop! Go on.…
    Painting? True, it had helped him, it had been an excellent pastime. Now nothing more was needed to pass away the heavy burden of time. Down its torrent raced, sparkling, shining from a thousand eyes, thrilling to a million songs—with him, still with him, forever with him. Sometimes he started up at night, supporting his burning temples in hot hands. He thought he could hear Time rustling by. He ought not to sleep; who dared sleep when Time glides away so quickly? To sleep was time lost. And softly, so as not to wake his wife, he got up, went into the town, went once more into the town where the lights shone. He sat at a table, looked frantically at the faces. That one? Or you—? Oh, don’t rush away—stay for a while!
    She let him go. She heard him, but she let him go, in the day as well as the night. At first she had gone with him; she, whose hope was now fulfilled. She saw him at the garden party of a family with whom they were on friendly terms; at a dinner, immaculately dressed, slim, quick, laughing, with gray hair. He danced faultlessly, with assurance. “Forty-five,” something said within her. He chatted and joked always with the youngest, she observed. It was horrifying. Just as if a dead man had come to life, as if a corpse with its mouth full of dust were reaching out for the bread of the living. Stay for a while! That memory which her jealous heart had clung to for twenty years and which had been her happiness and life, that memory of early, splendid days faded now, and she could not recall them.
    The night surrounded her like a prison wall without a gate. On the bedside table the clock ticked away a useless time which had to be endured. A trembling hand switched on the light, and his bright sketches greeted her from the walls.
    She looked at them as if for the first time. In this she was like the world, which at that time had also begun to look at his pictures. Their day had suddenly come, but for their creator it was already over. Paradox indeed that, when he was creating for twenty long years, he was the only one who saw his work. Now came the world, with letters and reproductions, with art dealers and exhibitions, with money and golden laurels—but the once-flowing spring of his interest was dry.
    “Yes, paintings,” he said, and went.
    The woman who was expecting his child lay in bed, and now it was she who gazed at the paintings. It was she who now saw his true image in them. His fleetness, his cheerfulness, his interest—all had gone. Gone? No, they were here, enhanced by the glory that eternity gives to life.
    There was one painted shortly before his “recovery,” the last to be finished before he put away his brush. He had made her sit at an open window; she sat motionless, as hardly ever in her active life. It was her picture, it was she when she was still with him, painted by him when she still had significance for him. Nothing but a young woman at a window, waiting, while the world rushed by outside. A young woman at a window—his most beautiful picture.
    Painted by him when he was still with her. Where was he now? One morning in a vibrant world full of the sun’s splendor (but the sun paled for her), he was carried home, disheveled, dirty, the clever hands contorted, the jaw fallen, dry blood on his temple. Policemen and detectives were very tactful. It had happened in a street, the name of which of course conveyed nothing. A fatal accident—yes, an accident. Say no more.
    Time, you must fly. Hurry, hurry. And now the son. The father was a radiant star which shone