THE JAIL
ant. Perhaps not even during the starvation of my student days, nor when I was in the army. I gulped down the soup, fell upon the meat, but then my enjoyment ceased; I happened to look round the room and saw about fifteen pairs of eyes, not human eyes, but starving, greedy, brutish eyes, watching my exertions. They sank, turned away, but I had seen them, and every morsel stuck in my throat. Papa Declich received a piece of meat, Budi a piece of pudding, in order that I might bribe my conscience and go on eating.
I ate my fill, in spite of the sharing. Papa Declich prepared a cup of his cold black coffee, I lit a cigar and a pleasant mood came upon me. Thank goodness, in that way we shall hold out for months, years, and survive everything safely and enter into a different epoch and different conditions. And it will be better than it is, perhaps will even be quite good. We have lived with Austria but have not grown together with it; everything we have done was only temporary, as it were; even when we ate, we ate standing and with a walking-stick in our hands, and when we lay down to sleep, we slept fully dressed and prepared at any hour to start on a journey. Like Simon Lamm, when he arrived, like the Old Testament Jews in the land of Egypt.
These and similar things were my cogitations, as with a feeling of comfort, I watched the smoke of my cigar. Resignation vanished, and was replaced by a zest for life and work, faith in the future. Somehow the jail had become agreeable. After all, if you stood under the window and craned your neck a little, you could see a segment of blue sky above, and freedom, freedom. This here, Frank, Papritz, the superintendent, Sponner, Schmied, the endless drab hours, the dirt, the stench, the cold,—auch das geht vorüber, (that also will pass away), as Ada Christen used to say, a contemporary of Neruda and the greatest poetess of German Austria,
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