“What for? How will that help? After all, he’s been seeing you every day for a year, and if he doesn’t know you yet, then writing’s of no use. And he can ask at the police station—they’ll soon tell him you are here, they won’t keep it a secret. And if he does come to visit you, then as far as I’m concerned you can go down and say to him: ‘This is the way things are, old chap. I shall show what I’m made of, and you shall show me what you are made of.’ And besides that: ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ you will say—not ‘We are going to have a baby.’ For you’re having it and you must keep it, too, and you’ll say: ‘I want the child to have a real man as his father, someone who can earn a bit of grub, something to eat, something to fill our tummies, so that I won’t go fainting in the street.’ ”
“Ma Krupass,” pleaded Petra, for the old woman was again becoming angry.
“Yes, yes, girlie,” she growled, “you can say that safely. It won’t rub the gilt off him, a man’s got to hear that sort of thing now and again, it does him good.”
“Yes, and what am I to do during the six months?”
“Now, girlie”—Frau Krupass was pleased—“that’s the first sensible word you’ve said this evening. Here, come and make yourself comfortable near me on the bed and let’s have a proper talk. We won’t talk any more about men anyway, a real woman shouldn’t talk so much about them, it only gives them swelled heads and they ain’t really so important.… What are you going to do during the year? I’ll tell you. You shall represent me.”
“Oh!” said Petra, a little disappointed.
VI
“Yes, you say, ‘Oh,’ ” said old Frau Krupass quite pleasantly. With a groan she crossed her legs, an action which revealed that she wore not only a very old-fashioned many-pleated skirt (she even had a petticoat underneath it) but also impossibly thick home-knitted woolen stockings—in the middle of summer. “You say, ‘Oh,’ girlie, and you are right. For how is a pretty young thing like you to take the place of an old scarecrow like me? I look like a keeper of a brothel or a flop house, don’t I?”
Petra shook her head with an embarrassed smile.
“But you’re wrong, girlie. And why are you wrong? Because you’ve written out bills in the shoe shop and can add up, and you’ve got eyes in your head that see what they look at. That’s what I told myself as soon as you came into the cell. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘here’s another one who’s got observant eyes, not bleary eyes like the idiots of today who look everywhere and see nothing.’ ”
“Have I really got such eyes?” Petra asked curiously, because her mirror had never given her the impression that her eyes were different from other people’s, and Wolfgang Pagel hadn’t yet said they were, although he had certainly from time to time felt their effect.
“If I say so, then you have,” declared Ma Krupass. “I’ve learned to know eyes in Fruchtstrasse where I’ve got fifty or sixty people running around; they all tell me lies with their mouths, but they can’t lie with their eyes! Well, here am I sitting in this miserable bug-hutch, brooding and wondering how much I’ll get this time; I’d like to think it’ll be three months, but it’ll probably be six. Killich also says it’ll be six, and Killich seldom makes a mistake; he must know, he’s my lawyer.”
Petra wanted to interpose a question, but the old woman nodded her head vigorously. “That’s all still to come. You’ll get to know everything at its proper time, girlie. And just as you said ‘Oh!’ before, so you can afterwards say ‘No!’; it won’t bother me. Except that you won’t say it.” She seemed so certain and so energetic, and at the same time so kind, that Petra lost all the doubts which such acquiescence in a prison sentence had aroused in her.
“And so here I sit and think,” Frau Krupass continued. “Six months in jail are all very well, and after all I do need some rest—but what’ll happen to the business, especially in times like these? Randolf can be trusted, but he’s weak in arithmetic; and now, when everything runs in millions and him using only slate and chalk—that won’t do, child, you can see that for yourself.”
Petra did see it.
“Yes, so here I sit and worry my head about managers, which is a nice word, except that they all steal like hungry crows and don’t think of the old woman in jail. But then you come in, child, and I look at you and your eyes and I see what goes on with that wench and I hear what she calls you—not to mention the attack on me and having my hair pulled out, and wrapping her in blankets—everything done nicely, without temper and yet not like the Salvation Army.…”
Petra sat quite still. But it does every person good to be rewarded with a little recognition, and it does especial good if that person has been ill-treated.
“Yes, and so I thought: She’s all right, she’s the sort of person you want. But then she’s in jail rig-out, you can’t get her. Just drop the idea, Ma Krupass. She’ll be patching shirts a long time after you’ve got out again. And then I hear what you’ve told me, and I wonder if there isn’t just the possibility that they may have sent the child straight from heaven to me in my loneliness.”
“Ma Krupass!” said Petra for the second time.
“There, Ma Krupass, of course, what else could it be?” said the old woman very pleased, and slapping Petra on the knee. “I told you a lot of unpleasant things before, didn’t I? Well, forget it, it won’t hurt you. When I was young I also had unpleasant things handed out to me, and afterwards, too, without stint: the boys were killed in the war and my old man was so depressed he hanged himself. But not at my place in Fruchtstrasse. He was already in Dalldorf, which is now called Wittenau. But don’t worry about it, is what I think—a little bitterness gingers you up.” She leaned forward. “But I am not so very cheerful even now, girlie, you understand that? I just seem cheerful. On the whole, I think the business ain’t worth the candle.”
And Petra nodded her head in complete agreement, and understood clearly that the business did not mean the police station in Alexanderplatz. She understood Ma Krupass’s outlook perfectly; one could find life rather depressing and yet not hang one’s head. In fact she had rather a similar attitude, and when you discover such feelings, you are always pleased.
“Yes, yes—but just because of that I carry on with the business. It keeps me alive. And if one doesn’t keep alive and do something, girlie, then it’s useless; you just rot alive. And what you’ve been doing, always squatting in a furnished room and perhaps, at the most, doing a bit of washing-up for the landlady—that’s no life, girl; it would make anyone crazy.”
Again Petra nodded her head. It was quite impossible to return to the old life. But she would have liked to know what sort of work it was which kept Frau Krupass so fresh and vigorous, and she hoped with all her heart that it was something decent and responsible.
And then Frau Krupass herself said: “Now I want to tell you, girlie, what sort of business I’ve got. Even if people do turn up their noses at it and say that it stinks, it’s still a good business. And it’s got nothing to do with my being in jail, for it’s a decent business—my being in jail is just the result of my own stupidity, because I was greedy for money. I can’t help it. I’ve said to myself a hundred times: ‘Don’t do it, Auguste (my name happens to be Auguste, but I never use it), don’t do it, you earn enough money as it is.’ But I can’t help it. And then I go and get caught—for the third time! And Killich says it’ll cost me six months.”
Greedy Frau Krupass! She looked very depressed, and Petra could see that her previous talk about six months’ rest was pure bravado—the old woman was by no means hard-boiled. On the contrary, she had an unearthly fear of six months in jail. She would like to have said something comforting to the old woman, but still didn’t exactly know what it was all about. She also hadn’t the faintest idea what the flourishing but dubious, yet apparently decent, business was that Frau Krupass ran.