Wolf Among Wolves

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Book: Read Wolf Among Wolves for Free Online
Authors: Hans Fallada
embarrassed, apologetic smile. “Forgive me if I have disturbed you. I feel so strange. I can’t understand it. I’m really worried.” And after a long pause, while he looked doubtfully at her: “I can’t get up.”
    “You can’t get up?” she asked skeptically. It was a joke, some nonsense of his, of course, a poor joke. “It’s impossible that all of a sudden you can’t get up.”
    “Yes,” he said slowly and seemed not to believe it himself. “But I feel as if I had no legs. Anyhow, they are numb.”
    “Nonsense,” she cried and jumped up. “You have caught a chill, or they’ve gone to sleep. Wait. I’ll help you.”
    But even as she spoke, even as she walked round the bed to him, terror pierced her.… It’s true, it’s true, she realized.
    Did she realize it? The old woman at the window shrugged her shoulders. How could she realize the impossible? The fleetest, the happiest, the most vivid creature in the world, not to be able to walk, not even to stand. Impossible to realize that!
    But the icy sensation had remained; it was as if she were inhaling more and more of coldness with every breath. Her heart tried to resist, but it, too, was getting cold. Round it an armor of ice closed tightly.
    “Edmund!” she called imploringly. “Wake up, get up!”
    “I can’t,” he murmured.
    He really could not. Just as he sat that morning in bed, so he had sat, day in and day out, year after year, in bed, in a wheeled chair, in a deck chair … sat, entirely healthy, without pain—but could not walk. Life which had started so flamboyantly, swift shining life, the smile of good luck, the blue sky and flowers—all was all gone and done with. Why could it not return? No answer. Oh, God, why not? And, if it had to be, why, then, so suddenly? Why without any warning? He had passed happily into sleep and had miserably awakened, to incredible wretchedness.
    Oh, she had not lain down under it; no, she hadn’t given in for a moment. All the twenty years this had lasted she hadn’t given in once. When he had longabandoned every hope, she still dragged him from physician to physician. Reports of a miraculous cure or a newspaper notice were enough to rekindle her optimism. In succession she believed in baths, electrical treatment, mud packs, massage, medicine, miracle-working saints. She wanted to believe in them, and she did believe.
    “Don’t bother,” he smiled. “Perhaps it’s just as well as it is.”
    “That’s what you’d like,” she cried angrily. “To give in, to bear it patiently. That’s too easy. Humility may be all right for the proud and fortunate who need checking. I hold with the ancients who fought the gods for their happiness.”
    “But I am happy,” he said good-humoredly.
    She didn’t want that kind of happiness, however. She despised it, it filled her with anger. She had married an attaché, an active man on good terms with his fellow men, a future ambassador. On the door she had fixed a plate: “Edmund Pagel, Attaché,” and it would stay. She would not have a new one made: “Pagel—Artist.” No, she had not married a color-grinder and a paint-dauber.
    He sat and painted. He sat in his wheeled chair and smiled and whistled and painted. Angry impatience filled her. Did he not understand that he was wasting his life on these stupid paintings at which people only smiled?
    “Let him alone, Mathilde,” said the relatives. “It’s very good for an invalid. He has occupation and amusement.”
    No, she would not let him alone. When she married him there had been no talk of painting; she didn’t know that he had ever held a paintbrush in his hand, even. She hated it all, down to the smell of the oil paints. She was always knocking against the frames, the easel was always in her way; she never resigned herself to it. His pictures she left in boarding houses, at watering-places, in the attics of their flats; his charcoal sketches lay around and were lost.
    Occasionally, in the

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