Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada

of his customers, in which case the vet would go up to them, inquire gravely ‘May I?’, and was generally invited to join them. For here Dr. Wilhelm was able to trade on another side of his character: he had quite a repertoire of bawdy country jokes and stories, which he could recite in the authentic local dialect. His stories were frequently met with gales of laughter, their effect heightened by the fact that his sour expression didn’t change at all — which put the corn merchant’s customers in a sweeter mood.
    Otherwise the vet generally did all right for himself in the station bar. He’d been a regular there for decades. For decades past, he had sat at the regulars’ reserved table from around six to eight in the evening, accompanied by his wife in earlier years, but on his own since her death. The landlord, Kurz, kept him on a tight rein, but generally made sure that his old customer didn’t go without.
    Around suppertime, the waiting room emptied quickly, and Dr. Wilhelm also went on his way. What awaited him now in the little town’s premier hotel was always an open question: it might be a lot, or it might be virtually nothing. The wine still flowed freely in this establishment, but the landlord was a man who liked to take his customers’ money — and the more the better. Even when it made very little sense to take money off his customers, since there was hardly anything left to buy with money, the landlord kept on increasing the price of his wines sold by the bottle, so that the cost of even a single bottle was way beyond the means of a poor pig innoculator like him, whose daily earnings frequently amounted to less than five marks.
    So here Dr. Wilhelm had to take potluck, and there were many times when he had to sit for hours over a glass of watered-down, wartime beer, while he morosely watched SS officers drinking one bottle after another. They never invited him over to their table: the SS always kept its distance from the ordinary German people. Or else there would be some Hitler Youth leader, not even twenty years old, knocking back dessert wines with his girlfriend — and no more interested than the others in the storytelling talents of the ageing vet.
    So these were difficult times for an old alcoholic, for whom drinking was a necessity of life. As the hours went by and the night wore on, and the patrons became increasingly drunk and boisterous, and the white-haired landlord, ever smiling and full of bonhomie, called time on them … as it became quite clear that there was nothing for him this evening, even though so many others were thoroughly well-oiled … as he then, having paid for his beer, totted up the few miserable coins and notes in his pocket to see if he might have enough for a small schnaps at least, knowing full well that he didn’t … as he finally picked up his stick and his hat with a heavy, bitter sigh and stepped out into the night to walk back to his house … and as he thought about the night ahead, in which he would have to summon up sleep with boring tablets instead of alcohol, which so divinely filled his sleep with sweet dreams … then his leathery face became, if possible, even more jaundiced than before, he was racked with envy for everyone and everything, and he would have gladly let the whole world go to hell without a thought, in return for a single bottle of wine!
    But the old vet had better days, too. All of a sudden, this premier hotel on the town square would be frequented by summer visitors or anglers on a fishing trip, who always loved to hear stories about this remote area that had scarcely been touched by the war. Or else a farmer would see the old man sitting there, which made him think how long it was since he had called him out to his farm, and his bad conscience would prompt him to invite Piglet Willem to join him at his table, chat to him, and give him a drink — for everybody knew about his