Other methods — dangerous ones — are known. Ours was harmless, and I can recommend it. By the imprints of our teeth we recognized how different, in spite of everything, we remained, what strangers to each other. I held the apple with the stem pointing heavenward and bit down toward the small end; Sibylle Miehlau (later called Billy) held the apple, before biting, by both ends. That way we blunted our teeth. That way we bore witness. That way cocooned feeling was made manifest. The surface: love; the inner lining: hate. Crosswise and lengthwise we bit, and heard ourselves biting.
It had to be quiet in our kitchen or in the garden. At most the beef-bone soup simmering in the kettle. Or wormy apples falling with a dull thud on rotting apples in which wasps were getting too much sweetness. We never bit into apples as we lay on the creaking bed in the dark, and never
while the wall clock was striking. Never did anyone watch us at it. Often we delayed our comparison until her bite and mine discolored, until our teeth marks turned significantly brown. But without words. Love tested.
So Lena and I were standing in our little garden behind the tarpaper-roofed workers' houses and rabbit hutches on Brabank, across from Strohdeich, on the opposite bank of the Mottlau, with the port and shipyard behind us. But no riveting hammers. Because we at the Klawitter Shipyard had already been on strike for four weeks. Lena, now six months gone, was standing under our Boskop apple tree. That morning I'd been agitating and distributing leaflets, which was forbidden, outside the rifle factory in the Lower City. Lena's early-socialist soup-kitchen face. Though the harm was already done and couldn't be undone, though the theft was already behind me, I looked her full in the face while I bit and heard her bite.
Quickly discoloring, our apples lay bite to bite on the pile of driftwood that Ludwig Skrover and I had rafted from the Dead Vistula at night. Lud was my friend. Boskop apples are the most suitable. After testing our love, which was strong in spite of it all, Lena said, as though suspecting nothing, "I'll take some of these windfall apples and make us pancakes and put on a little cinnamon." Or maybe she noticed something? I tossed my bitten apple in with the windfalls in Lena's apron. In the autumn of 1885, at a time when Bismarck's Socialist Laws were in force, the workers struck the Klawitter Shipyard. Otto Friedrich Stubbe, a dashing young fellow and a rousing agitator, was a member of the strike committee, while Lena Stubbe, because she had formerly been a cook at the Wallgasse soup kitchen, was drafted, despite her advanced state of pregnancy, to cook cabbage and barley soups in an unused laundry for the hundred and seventy-eight striking shipyard workers and their many-mouthed families. At the same time, she took charge of the strike fund.
The usual incidents. Fights with scabs outside the shipyard gate in Strohdeich. Mounted police joining the melee with their clubs. The injured — bruises and abrasions, for the most part — were all workers. Socialist meetings, at which not only speeches but also leaflets in bold-faced type called upon
the sawmill workers in the timber port, the stevedores on Warehouse Island, the well-organized printers and typographers at the Kafemann Print Shop, and the bakers at the Germania Bread Factory to join in a solidarity strike, were broken up by the police, who confiscated the leaflets.
When work stoppages nevertheless occurred in the port, in the railroad-car factory, even at the rifle factory and the Imperial Naval Shipyard, eleven party functionaries were arrested and — as the laws provided — exiled. A few, among them Otto Friedrich Stubbe's friend Ludwig Skrover, emigrated to America. But the strike went on and might possibly, after six or seven weeks, have forced the introduction of the ten-hour day and a reduction of the work load if, during the fourth week, the strike fund had not been robbed.
Lena Stubbe immediately reported the theft to the strike committee, promised to replace the stolen sum — seven hundred and forty-five marks were missing — but expressed no suspicion, though there were some who in whispers suspected Lisbeth, her sixteen-year-old daughter by her first marriage, and though Lena knew perfectly well that her Otto, who accused and thrashed all the children, had laid hands on the strike fund. Immediately after Lena's confinement in November, the newborn girl child (Martha), the five-year-old Luise, and the five-year-old Ernestine were given over to Lis-beth's care. Lena took a job as toilet attendant at the Hotel Kaiserhof. And in the spring of the following year, when Otto Friedrich Stubbe was brought up on charges though more than half the stolen sum had been worked off, Lena went to the comrades, spoke in defense of her husband, and got the charges withdrawn. "I know my Otto," she said. "He'd never do such a thing." The comrades apologized to Comrade Stubbe.
But hard as Lena tried to hush up the theft, to fill the hole in the strike fund by nightwork, and to make her Otto think she suspected nothing, he knew she knew. And because he was humiliated by her forbearance, he got drunk on potato schnapps every Friday and beat her regularly every Friday in the presence of the whimpering children. Lisbeth would run out of the house. And every time Otto Stubbe beat his Lena with a heavy hand or with his razor strop, he
cried about himself, and Lena, who didn't cry, had to comfort him. And how, indeed, could she have stood there with her hands folded while a grown man cried his eyes out as if he had nothing but his suspenders to hold him up.
It had been the same with Friedrich Otto Stobbe, her first husband. Stobbe, who barely had time to get her with child (Lisbeth) before enlisting in the Fifth Danzig Grenadiers to fight against the French (in the Franco-Prussian War) and falling at Mars-la-Tour, also, like Otto Friedrich Stubbe after him, drank rotgut and beat his Lena every Friday. Stobbe, too, was a weepy type, needful of consolation. Lena had a penchant for strong men with weak characters.
At the time when she was being beaten regularly once a week by Otto Stubbe, who like her first husband was an anchor maker, and obliged to comfort him afterward, she was in her mid-thirties, he in his mid-twenties. Consequently it wasn't hard for Lena to be the young man's always willing wife and all-forgiving mother. Never, during either the whopping or the comforting, was the robbed strike fund mentioned. The weekly ritual was more on the silent side, if we choose to disregard Lena's motherly mumblings—"Now it's all right; you'll feel better soon" — and Otto's invariable announcement of "I'm going to hang myself. I'm going to hang myself." People say those things without thinking. Lena was familiar with such talk from her first husband. And yet Friedrich Otto Stobbe had died quite normally of a bullet in the belly. So all Lena could say was "Oh, Otto, you wouldn't go doing yourself a harm for nothing."
But one day, a good year after the strike was called off-Lena was pregnant again, the stolen money had been repaid— Otto Friedrich Stubbe was hanging from a nail over the doorway in the rabbit hutch behind the house — in his socks, for his wooden shoes had fallen off. Lena, who was sweeping the yard because it was Saturday, heard the crashing of the stool and the wooden shoes, heard the drumming of the terrified rabbits, dropped her broom, thought of Stobbe and Stubbe both at once — also probably of apples I had eaten with her to test our love — put all the blame on the accursed potato schnapps, thought no more of the beatings than if they had never happened, grabbed the knife she used to kill rabbits
with, and cut the dangling Otto down from the nail in the lintel. The ordinarily dashing anchor maker soon regained consciousness, but for a good week he had to wear the collar of his blue shirt turned up.
Men with neatly parted hair are standing all about, and they mean me when they ask "Why?" To the question why, when there's so little time, I spend such an extravagant amount of it drawing hand-forged nails with a soft pencil or an English steel pen, I, who collect odds and ends out of pure passion, knew no answers; for the three bent nails mean enough, have left purpose behind them, no longer recall their occasions or the wood they were driven into once upon a time, when each nail stood straight and may have made some sense.