After dinner – pea soup, and I ate to stock up – Pauli calmed down and peace was restored. The widow even insisted I take a second helping. I can sense my star is on the rise again, thanks to Nikolai. Should that bother me? Should I hold my apartment mates to some specific moral standard? I won’t. Homo homini lupus. It’s true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives. At most I can imagine a mother going hungry to keep her children fed – but that’s probably because mothers feel their children as their own flesh and blood. On the other hand, look how many mothers have been sentenced in recent years for selling their children’s milk coupons, or bartering them for cigarettes? Hunger brings the wolf out in us. I’m waiting for the first moment in my life when I tear a piece of bread out of the hands of someone weaker. There are times when I think such a moment could never come. I can picture myself getting weaker and weaker, shrinking away, no longer having the strength to rob anyone. Strange thoughts to have on a full stomach and with a new Russian provider waiting in the wings.
The news in the stairwell is that they’ve ferreted out a former Nazi party boss in our building, a Reichsamtsleiter or something like that – I don’t know the Nazi rankings very well. I saw the men in the basement quite often, and I remember the blonde woman who had been reassigned and whom no one really knew, always holding hands with the man identified as her lodger, whom nobody knew either – two turtle doves, the cock being the boss in question. He didn’t look like anything special, sitting around in his shabby clothes, and the few times he spoke he sounded stupid. That’s what you call a good disguise.
I’d just like to know how word got out. It wasn’t his mistress who’d denounced him; according to the bookselling wife she’s howling pathetically in her fourth-floor apartment, where she managed to come through untouched except for two Ivans the first night. She doesn’t dare go out any more, she’s afraid they’ll take her away as well. They came for him in a military vehicle.
We have mixed feelings, talking about this. A bit of schadenfreude cannot be denied. The Nazis were too pompous and subjected the people to too many harassments, especially in the last few years, so it’s right they should atone for the general defeat. Still, I wouldn’t want to be the one to turn in these former martinets. Maybe it would be different if they’d actually beaten me or killed someone close to me. But what’s playing out now is not so much grand revenge as petty malice, for the most part: that man looked down on me, his wife snapped her ‘Heil Hitler’ at my wife, besides he earned more, smoked thicker cigars, so I’ll bring him down a peg, shut him up along with his old woman…
Incidentally I learned in the stairwell that next Sunday is Pentecost.
<p>FRIDAY, 18 MAY 1945</p>Up early to get water and look for wood. Slowly but surely I’m developing a real eye for firewood; I hardly miss a piece. I keep finding new places that haven’t been combed over – in basements, ruins, abandoned barracks. Around noon Fräulein Behn brought us our new ration cards. For the time being the widow, Pauli and I belong to the fifth and lowest category – ‘others’. Here are the allotments listed on my card: 300 grams of bread, 400 grams of potatoes, 20 grams of meat, 7 grams of fat, 30 grams of food items (semolina, barley, rolled oats, etc.) and 15 grams of sugar. On top of that there’s a monthly allowance of 100 grams of coffee substitute, 400 grams of salt, 20 grams of real tea and 25 grams of coffee beans. By comparison, heavy labourers in Group I, which also includes ‘well-known artists’, technicians, factory managers, pastors, school principals, epidemiologists and epidemiological nurses, receive 600 grams of bread daily, 100 grams of meat, 30 grams of fat and 60 grams of food items, with a monthly ration of 100 grams of coffee beans. In the middle are Group II (blue-collar workers) and Group III (white-collar workers), with 500 and 400 grams of bread per day, respectively. Only potatoes are distributed with democratic equality to all stomachs. Second-string intelligentsia are supposed to be in Group II. Maybe I can sneak in there.
You can sense that all this has had a calming effect. Everyone is sitting and studying their ration cards. We’re being governed again; those in power are providing for us. I’m amazed we’re supposed to get as much as we are, but I doubt it will be possible to distribute the rations punctually according to schedule. The widow is happy about the real coffee beans and promises to drink to Stalin’s health with the first cup.
