Paper bandages.
Badly wounded cases.
Groans.
Low operating-trolleys trundling back and forth all day.
Josef Stoll was in the bed next to mine.
Both his legs were off, but he didn't know that.
He could not see it, because the bedclothes were supported on a wire cradle.
He would not have believed it anyway, for he could still feel the pain in his feet.
Two chaps died in the night in our room, one very slowly and hard.
1919.
Home again.
Revolution.
Starvation.
And outside the machine-guns rattling.
Soldier against soldier.
1920.
Putsch.
Karl Broger shot.
Koster and Lenz arrested.
My mother in hospital.
Cancer.
1921. . . .
I pondered awhile.
No, I couldn't remember.
That year, was missing.
1922, I was a platelayer in Thuringia; 1923, advertising manager for a rubber goods firm.
That was during the inflation.
At one time I was earning as much as two hundred billion marks a month.
We used to be paid twice a day, each payment followed by a half-hour's leave, so that one could dash out to the shops and buy something before next publication of the dollar exchange rate—for by that time the money would be again worth only half.
And then what?
The years after that?
I put down the pencil.
There was no point in going over all that.
Anyway, I could not remember any longer; it had been all too confused.
My last birthday I celebrated as pianist at the Cafe International.
It was then I met Koster and Lenz once more.
And now here I was in the Aurewo—Auto-Repair-Workshop; Koster & Co.
Lenz and I were the "Co.," but the shop belonged really only to Koster.
He had been our school friend, and in the Army pur company commander; then he became an air pilot, and later for a time a student; then a speedway racer. . . . And finally he had bought this show.
Lenz, after spending some years drifting around South America, had been first to join him—then I.
I fished a cigarette from my pocket.
After all, I had every reason to be content.
I was not so badly off really; I had work, I was strong, I did not tire easily, I was healthy as things go. . . . But it was better not to think too much about all that—when alone, at any rate; and especially at night.
For every now and then things had a way of rising up suddenly out of the past and staring at one with dead eyes.
It was against such times that one kept a bottle of schnapps.
The gate creaked on its hinges.
I tore up the slip of paper with the dates on it and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
The door burst open, and Gottfried Lenz—tall, thin, with a straw-coloured mop of hair and a nose that might have belonged to somebody else—stood framed in the doorway.
"Bobby," he bawled, "you lump of obesity, stand up!
Put your heels together!