It was this which had made him remove Petra Ledig from the doorway in Georgenkirchstrasse. It was this which, in reply to his superintendent’s reproachful “What’s the matter with you, Gubalke? You—of all people—twenty minutes late,” made him report: “An arrest. This girl is connected with gamblers.”
These last words, which he would never have uttered had he not been delayed—nothing being further from his thoughts than to do harm—were for some hours all that the police station knew about the arrest. Oberwachtmeister Gubalke had only wished to remove a half-naked girl from the streets, intending to give her a seat in the police station, and then get her something to eat. During the course of the evening he would have found out what sort of girl she was, would have begged some garments for her from a relief committee and, after a lecture on order and unseemly conduct, discharged her into the world again.
And instead of carrying out these good intentions, Herr Gubalke had reported that she was connected with gamblers. An unpunctuality which can only be excused by a kind heart and compassion remains an unpunctuality; this remark about gamblers turned the unpunctuality into a necessary official action. Until the moment when that remark, never to be recalled, escaped his lips, Gubalke had not even dreamed of ascribing to the girl any complicity in the vice of gambling, which he knew about only through women’s gossip. But man is a weak creature and with most of us—men and women alike—the tongue is weakness’s weakest point. Under the necessity of justifying himself, Gubalke entangled Petra’s fate with that of a gambler; and, as a finishing touch, turned a single gambler into gamblers.
It is certain that the Oberwachtmeister did not realize the far-reaching consequences to Petra Ledig of these few words. Hastily he buckled on his pistol, hooked on his rubber truncheon and thought only of going as quickly as possible to the assistance of his comrades in Kleine Frankfurterstrasse, in trouble with some street gangs. He was in such a hurry that he did not even look at the girl on his way out. If he thought of her again, it was certainly not with a bad conscience. At any rate she had been removed from the street into the safety of the police station, and at the latest he would be back in a couple of hours to deal with the matter.
Unfortunately, two hours later the Oberwachtmeister was lying in hospital at the Friedrichshain, mortally wounded, his bowels lacerated by a murderer’s bullet. He died the most disorderly, filthy and lingering death which could finish off such a clean and orderly man. The case of Petra Ledig was forever beyond his influence.
Nevertheless he did influence it. By the time the news of Gubalke’s murder reached the agitated police station, Petra Ledig had spent two hours there, unmolested and almost unperturbed. Except for a trifling incident, nothing worth mentioning had happened to her. An indifferent man or other in uniform, neither kind nor unkind, had pushed her into a small cell rather like a cage in the Zoo, with three solid walls, and a fourth of bars facing the charge-room. To her request that they should bring her something to eat, no matter what, as the Herr Wachtmeister had promised, the indifferent man at first mumbled that they had no facilities there, and that she must wait until she arrived at Alexanderplatz. After a while, however, he appeared with a thick crust of dry bread and a cup of coffee. He handed them to her between the bars.
Nothing better could have been given the half-starved Petra as her first nourishment. The stale and very hard crust compelled her to nibble away at extremely small fragments, which had to be chewed for a long time. In the beginning she was assailed again and again by waves of nausea. The stomach refused to keep down the food, to restart its activity. Huddled on the bench, her eyes closed, her head pressed against the corner of the cell, Petra heroically attacked her nausea, one sweat of weakness following another. Again and again she forced the food back into her stomach. I must eat, she thought dully, exhausted but unyielding. She was not eating for herself alone.
The crust of bread, which a three-year-old child would have managed in five minutes, lasted almost half an hour. But when she had finished it a physical warmth filled her, a feeling akin to spiritual bliss.
All this time she had not been conscious of the world around her, but now that she felt restored she began to take an interest in the life of the charge-room. That world held no shocks for her. Anyone who came from the place she had come from could not be afraid of greed or vulgarity, vice or drunkenness. All was part and parcel of human life, an expression of it, as was indeed Wolfgang’s smile and embrace, pleasure at a new dress, or the display in the window of a flower shop.
Nor did anything happen in the next half-hour to frighten her. They brought in a starved-looking youth who, as the half-audible examination showed, had tried to steal a pair of shoes from a department store; a drunken bilker; an unhappy woman in a shawl who, it seemed, took furnished rooms only with the intention of stealing something from them; and a man who sold gold-plated watches as solid gold, and found buyers by pretending that this unique opportunity was the result of picking a pocket.
All this wreckage washed into the charge-room underwent examination with composure; the prisoners wandered resignedly into cages which were locked behind them by the uninterested man in uniform.
Then the noise started. Two policemen brought in a woman, dead drunk and raving. They almost had to carry her. With benevolence—or what looked like it—they listened to the most filthy abuse; the girl, they said, had filched the pocketbook of her equally drunk gentleman escort, whom a third policeman now brought in. Rather pale and stupid-looking, he evidently grasped very little of what was going on outside him, because he was too preoccupied with what was going on within him. He was very sick.
The girl’s drunken screaming prevented any of the evidence being recorded; the yellow, half-audible secretary could not prevail on her to keep quiet. Again and again she flew, with her long, red-lacquered, dirty nails, at the faces of the policemen, the secretary and her gentleman friend.
This girl Petra recognized with genuine fear, reminded of a time in her life which she had believed forgotten, and was ashamed of. She knew her, not by name, it is true, but from her activities in the better part of the West End, Tauentzienstrasse, Kurfürstendamm and, after the restaurants had closed, also in Augsburgerstrasse. On her beat she was called “The Hawk,” probably because of her thin curved nose and her unreasoning hostility to any rival.
In those bad days before Petra had asked Wolfgang to take her along with him she had encountered the Hawk on several of those rare occasions when, the lack of money having become too frightening, she had herself gone on the hunt for a paying gentleman. Probably about that time the Hawk had been placed under police supervision and from then on had, with a noisy hatred which stuck at nothing, persecuted any girl who did not belong to the “profession.” When she discovered someone poaching on her beat, accosting a gentleman or even only glancing at him, she would try first to bring in the police. If that did not succeed or no policeman was near, she would seek to lower the intruder in the eyes of her gentleman, starting from a bad accusation and going on to a worse; at first accusing her of being a thief, next of having a venereal disease, and so on and so on. Her ultimate weapon had been a howling screech, an hysterical yell of rage stimulated by cocaine and alcohol to an inconceivable pitch, whereupon the other’s gentleman took to his heels.
Petra had had always the feeling that the Hawk disliked her particularly, and persecuted her with an especial hatred. Once she had escaped assault only by headlong flight through the dark streets to Victoria-Luise Platz where she found a hiding place behind the half-circle of pillars. Another time, however, she had not been so lucky. The Hawk had dragged her out of the taxi into which she and a gentleman were stepping, and there had been a free fight (the gentleman escaping in the taxi). Petra’s dress had been torn to shreds and her umbrella broken.