The Fourth Heap

by Magnus Hirschfeld, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I

The bed in the back room at Frau Kubisch's was one metre and five centimetres wide. Gustav Ruthenberg had measured it with the steel rule from his tin the first week he lodged there, because he was a turner and measured things, and because he wanted to know exactly how much of it was his. Half, by the arrangement: two marks fifty a week for the half-bed, a hook on the door and coffee in the morning. The other half belonged to whoever had the night shift, and since October that had been Ernst Pagel, a fitter from the same works on the Huttenstrasse.

They did not share the bed. They shared it in turn. Ernst came off at five in the morning and was up the four flights by twenty past. Gustav rose at a quarter past and was out of the door by twenty-five to six. So there were, on a good morning, some fifteen minutes in which both of them were in the back room with the lamp turned low, and Frau Kubisch's alarm clock ticking through the wall, and the window gone white with frost on the inside.

In those minutes Gustav dressed and Ernst undressed. That was all that happened, and Frau Kubisch, who knew everything that happened in her flat down to the last spoonful of chicory, had no complaint to make of it. Ernst hung his jacket on Gustav's hook because Gustav's hook was empty by then. Gustav laced his boots sitting on the edge of the mattress while Ernst, behind him, got in on the side that was still warm. Sometimes Ernst said, "You've left it hot for me," and Gustav said, "I've been working at it all night." Sometimes neither of them said anything, and Gustav sat a moment longer than the laces needed, with his back to the other man and the other man's knees against the small of it through the blanket.

Then he took his tin and his bread and went down into the dark, and the cold on the stairs had a smell of coal and cabbage and cat. In the evening it was the same thing the other way round, except that in the evening Ernst had already gone when Gustav came in. The bed would be made, badly, and the pillow would still hold the dent of a head. Gustav would lie down in the dent.

On Sundays the works were shut, and then they each had a whole day and no bed to speak of.

II

The card came with Saturday's post, which Frau Kubisch put out on the kitchen table beside the bread, so that everybody's letters were read before they were opened. There were not many. A bill for her husband, who was at the Spandau arsenal and came home on Saturday nights. A picture postcard for Martha from a girl in Rixdorf. And for Gustav a plain grey card, addressed in a clerk's hand, with a printed text on the back.

"From the doctor," said Frau Kubisch. "The one in the papers."

Gustav turned it over. The print was small. It was addressed to the workers of the metal trades of Berlin. It said that a scientific investigation was being made, that the reply was without name and could not be traced, that nobody should write his name on it, and that the investigation served the cause of knowledge and of justice. Then came the one question, which was whether the love of the man who held the card was directed towards women, towards men, or towards both. There were three places for the answer. Under them, the name of a committee and of the doctor, Hirschfeld, at an address in Charlottenburg.

"Martha's young man had one," said Frau Kubisch. "The Kaminski boy. He put it straight in the stove."

"He's not my young man," said Martha, from the stove.

"It's in the Lokal-Anzeiger that some students have been to the police about it. Students. At the Technische Hochschule." Frau Kubisch cut the bread against her chest, towards herself, as she always did, and Gustav watched the knife come in. "Gentlemen's sons. They said it was filth to send to a decent person. There'll be a case."

"Then I'll burn mine too," said Gustav, and put it in his breast pocket.

Martha brought the coffee. She was nineteen and worked at a cigar shop on the Turmstrasse, and her hands smelled of the leaf even on Saturdays. Her mother had decided some time in the autumn that Gustav would do. He had a trade, he did not drink more than a man ought, he paid on Fridays without being asked. He had taken Martha skating twice, on the Plötzensee, on Sunday afternoons, and bought her a cup of chocolate at a stand on the shore, and she had held his arm on the ice. He had liked it. That was the truth of it, and it was one of the things the card did not ask.

"Read it out," said Martha. "What does it want to know?"

"Whether I've paid my union dues."

"It does not."

"Then it's none of your business either, Fräulein," said Gustav, and Martha laughed and hit him with the dishcloth, and her mother looked at the two of them with satisfaction, the way she looked at the meat when it came out right.

III

He carried the card about for a week.

He carried it to the works, where in the dressing-room on Monday morning a man named Brettschneider held up his own and read out the question in the voice of a pastor, and asked whether there were any of the third sort present, and could they kindly stand to the left. Somebody said there was no need to stand, you could tell them by the walk, and Brettschneider walked up the room with his hand on his hip, and the men laughed, and Gustav laughed, because it was funny, the way Brettschneider did it, with his great beer-belly in front of him like a bass drum. Then the whistle went and they went to the machines.

He had a Ludwig Loewe lathe, an old one, belt-driven off the shaft that ran the length of the shop, and he was turning spindles that week for some customer in Silesia. Forty to the hour, more if the steel was clean. The work needed both hands and the whole eye, and left nothing over for thinking, which was the mercy of it. But at the dinner break he sat on a crate by the yard door with his bread and his can of coffee, and took the card out of his pocket, and read the question again. Towards women. Towards men. Towards both.

He tried each one, the way you try a gauge on a piece of work.

Towards women. Well, and Martha on the ice, with her arm in his, and her weight thrown on him every time her feet went. He had liked the weight. Before Martha there had been a girl in Stettin, when he was apprenticed, a fishwife's daughter, and they had done in her mother's yard what such people do in yards, three or four times, and he had liked that as well, in the way a man likes a bath. The gauge went over that part of him and fitted, more or less.

Towards men. Here the gauge would not go on at all. He thought of Brettschneider walking up the dressing-room. He thought of the men in the Tiergarten at night, by the Rousseau island, whom everybody knew about and everybody laughed at, men in good coats with their collars up and their faces turned away from the lamps, and whom the police took up in a van now and then and put in the newspaper with their initials. He had never wanted any of them. He had never wanted the men at the works, not Kaminski nor Brettschneider nor the pretty apprentice whom they all teased. He did not look at men in the street. He was perfectly certain about this, and it was a relief to be certain about something.

Towards both. That was worse. It made him sound as if he had a great appetite. He did not have a great appetite. He had a bed one metre and five centimetres wide, half of it his, and fifteen minutes in the morning.

He folded the card in two along its middle and then unfolded it, because it was not his to spoil, and put it back in his pocket.

IV

On Sunday they walked. There was no plan to it. Ernst got up at noon, because on Sundays he slept the morning through, and Gustav had been out to the baker and the barber and was sitting in the kitchen with the paper when Ernst came through in his shirtsleeves to the tap. Frau Kubisch had taken Martha to her sister's in Wedding. Herr Kubisch was in the front room, asleep in his chair with his mouth open and the arsenal still on him, a smell of oil and metal. Ernst put his whole head under the tap. When he came up he looked at Gustav through the water running off him, and Gustav put down the paper and fetched his coat.

They went the long way to the river, by the Stephanstrasse and the Lehrter goods station, because nobody they knew went that way on a Sunday. It was very cold and clear. At the Humboldthafen the barges were frozen in, and boys were sliding between them on the ice, and a man in a brown cap was selling hot chestnuts from a brazier, ten pfennigs the bag. Ernst bought a bag and they shared it, walking. They did not walk close. There was always a hand's breadth of air between their sleeves, which Gustav had once measured too, without a rule.

Ernst was the smaller of the two, thick through the chest, with a fitter's hands, the nails broken short and black in the creases however he scrubbed. He was from Silesia, from a village near Glatz. He had a mother there and a sister who sent him a letter at Christmas. He had been a soldier, two years in a Pomeranian regiment, and he had come to Berlin after that because a man from his company had told him there was work. Gustav knew these facts about him the way one knows the dimensions of a thing one handles every day. He knew the scar under his jaw, which was from a horse. He knew that Ernst slept on his left side with his fist under his cheek, because the dent in the pillow was on the left. He knew that Ernst coughed in the mornings when he came in, from the brass dust in the fitting shop, and that the cough was worse this winter than last.

"You've had one of those cards," Ernst said, at the far end of the basin, where the railway bridge went over.

"So've you."

"I have." Ernst cracked a chestnut with his thumbnail. "Burned it."

"Kaminski burned his."

"Kaminski would burn a letter from his own mother if it had a question in it." Ernst ate the chestnut. "You've still got yours."

Gustav did not ask how he knew. The jacket hung on the same hook.

"What are you going to put on it?"

"I don't know."

"Put women," said Ernst. "Put women and post it, if you've got to post it. Then the doctor's happy and you're happy."

"It isn't true."

"Isn't it?" Ernst looked at him sideways, the way he looked at a joint he did not trust. "You took the Kubisch girl skating."

"That's true, then. That part's true."

"Well."

"It's not the whole."

Ernst said nothing for a while. On the bridge above them a train was going over, very slowly, carriage after carriage, the couplings knocking one after another all the way down the line, and the bridge shed a little snow on them from its girders.

"Put men, then," said Ernst, when the train had gone, and his voice had gone flat. "Put men and see what that gets you."

"It's not men."

"What is it, then?"

Gustav could not say it. Not because there was nobody to hear, there was nobody, only the boys on the ice a hundred metres off; but because there was no word that was the right size. Every word he had was either too big or it belonged to someone else. It belonged to Brettschneider with his hand on his hip, or to the men by the Rousseau island, or to the initials in the newspaper. He stood on the towpath with the chestnut bag in his hand, going cold, and he felt the way he sometimes felt at the lathe when a piece came off that was wrong and he could not find, with every gauge in the tin, where the fault lay.

"Listen," said Ernst, very low. "It says nobody can trace it. Well, perhaps. It goes in the box, and the box goes to the post office, and in the post office there's a clerk, and the clerk's got a brother-in-law at the Alexanderplatz. There's a doctor reading them. All right, he's a decent man, he's a Jew, they say, he does it for nothing. And next year he's in court with the students and the court says, give us your cards, Herr Doktor. What then?"

"There's no name on them."

"There's your hand on them. Your hand's on every job ticket in the shop."

Gustav had not thought of this, and it was true, and he felt it go through him.

"Why does he want to know?" said Ernst. "That's what I'd ask him. A man doesn't ask you how much you earn unless he's going to take some of it."

"He wants to count us."

"And then what? When he's counted us?"

Gustav did not know. He had read in the paper, as everybody had, that there was a committee that wanted the Paragraph done away with, and that it had gone to the Reichstag with a list of names, professors and writers and so on, and the Reichstag had laughed and kept the Paragraph. He had not thought about it because it had nothing to do with him. The Paragraph was for the men by the Rousseau island. It was not for two turners who shared a bed in shifts and a bag of chestnuts on a Sunday.

"Perhaps," he said, "if there were enough of us on the cards, they'd see it wasn't only those ones in the park."

"Us," said Ernst.

It was the first time either of them had used the word with that meaning. It lay on the towpath between them like something dropped. Ernst looked at it and then at Gustav, and then he threw the last chestnut a long way out on the ice, where the boys went after it, sliding.

"I'm going back," he said. "I want my dinner."

They went back by the same streets, the same hand's breadth apart, and at the door of the house Ernst went up first, and Gustav waited by the bins in the courtyard and counted a hundred before he followed.

V

He sat up that night in the kitchen after the others were in bed. He had the card on the oilcloth in front of him and a pencil from the works, a carpenter's pencil, flat, that he had sharpened with his knife into a chisel edge.

Ernst had gone at a quarter to six. He had stood in the doorway of the back room with his cap on and his can under his arm and said, "Well. Do what you like," and gone down the stairs coughing. That was what Ernst said when he meant the opposite, and also, sometimes, when he meant exactly that, and Gustav had not been able to tell which.

The kitchen was warm from the range. Frau Kubisch had banked it for the morning. The alarm clock ticked on the shelf beside the coffee mill. Through the wall he could hear Herr Kubisch snoring in long breaths, and once Martha turning over in the alcove where she slept, and the creak of her cot.

He thought about the doctor in Charlottenburg. He had never seen a picture of him. He made up a man with a beard and spectacles, at a desk, with a great many cards in front of him, putting each one on its pile. Women here. Men there. Both in the middle. It would be quick work, like sorting rivets. A man could do several hundred an hour. And when the doctor got to Gustav's card, whatever Gustav put on it, it would go on a pile, and it would be a rivet on a pile of rivets, and it would be wrong.

He thought: Ernst is right, and the safe thing is to put it in the range.

He thought: I measured the bed.

He picked up the pencil. He did not put a mark in any of the three places. He turned the card so the margin was towards him, the strip of grey under the printed lines where there was nothing, and in the smallest hand he could make, not his job-ticket hand, a hand with the letters standing upright and separate as if each one had been turned on the lathe, he wrote:

Not towards men. Towards one. Also, women. But one.

He looked at it a long time. It was not grammar. It was not anything the doctor would have a pile for. He nearly rubbed it out with his thumb, and did not.

Then he put the card in his breast pocket and the pencil in his tin, and turned down the lamp, and went in and lay down on his half of the bed, on the left, in the dent that Ernst had left there.

VI

The pillar box was on the corner of the Turmstrasse, by the Kleiner Tiergarten, where the trams turned. The first collection was at seven. It was not on his way to the works, and he went round by it all the same, past the cigar shop with its shutters down, and stood by the box in the dark with the card in his glove.

It was colder than the day before. The sky over Moabit was just beginning to go grey at the bottom, over the gasworks. A tram came round the corner empty and lit, with the driver stamping his feet on the platform, and went away towards the Beusselstrasse ringing its bell for nobody.

He had the card halfway into the slot when somebody said, "Give it here."

Ernst had come along the Turmstrasse behind him. He had not gone up to bed. He was in his work clothes with his can under his arm and the brass dust grey in the lines of his face, and he was breathing through his mouth, as if he had come quickly, and the breath stood out in front of him in the lamplight.

Gustav gave it to him.

Ernst turned it to the lamp. He read the three places, and saw no mark in any of them. Then he found the margin. He read it slowly, the way he read everything, with his lips moving a little. Gustav watched him read the word one.

Ernst did not say anything. He stood with the card for a moment, and the tram bell rang a long way off. Then he put it in the box himself, pushing it through the slot with his broken thumbnail until it dropped, and they heard it land on whatever was already in there.

"Now you'll be late," said Ernst.

"So will you. You'll be late to bed."

"I've left it cold for you," said Ernst, which made no sense, and he went off down the Turmstrasse to the house, coughing, and Gustav went the other way, to the works.

VII

In Charlottenburg, in the spring, the doctor sorted the cards on the dining-room table, because his study was not large enough for the heaps. There were some nineteen hundred of them from the metal trades. The great heap on the left grew all morning and the two small heaps beside it grew slowly. He worked in his shirtsleeves with a tally sheet, making the strokes in fives.

Some of the cards were written on. Many were obscene, a few were threats, and a good number had Schweinerei written across them in a firm hand, sometimes with a mark in one of the places as well. He counted those as they were marked and set aside what was not. One man had written that he loved his wife and his pigeons. One had drawn a gallows. He made a note of each in a pocket book, because a note costs nothing and nobody knows yet what it will be worth.

The card from the Turmstrasse he found a little after three. He read the margin and turned it over, and read the printed side to see if he had missed a mark, and turned it back.

He sat with it. Outside a cart went by in the Berliner Strasse. The tally sheet lay beside him with its columns, and there was no column for this.

He thought about putting it with the women, since it said women. He thought about putting it in the middle with the both, since it said both, after a fashion. He did not think about putting it with the men, since it said, quite plainly, not. And he knew that whichever heap he put it on, he would make it say something it did not say, and the number at the bottom of that column would be very slightly false, and he would print the number, and in the court the students' lawyer would hold up the number.

He put the card down by itself at the edge of the table, away from the three heaps, beside the inkstand. It looked very small there. He looked at it a while longer, the plain grey card with the upright letters in the margin, as if each one had been turned on a lathe.

Then he took up his pen and drew, on the tally sheet, a fourth column, ruled it down to the bottom of the page, and made in it a single stroke.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ā Magnō Hirschfeldō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Magnus Hirschfeld, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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