Iron Gustav Read Online Free

‘Oh!’, but so happy. Then she looked at him. ‘Is that you, Father?’
    ‘Good morning,’ he said slowly.
    ‘Good morning, Father. Listen …’
    ‘What is it? You should be asleep!’
    ‘Never mind, I’ll go to sleep immediately. Father, do you know what time Erich came home?’
    ‘You mustn’t tell tales, you know that.’
    ‘At one o’clock, Father! Fancy, one o’clock.’
    ‘Shame, Evchen, you shouldn’t tell tales.’ This was not said very firmly, however, for what he had just heard agitated him very much.
    ‘Shouldn’t tell tales! When he’s always telling about me! In the Café Köller they said he’d got a lot of money, Father.’
    ‘You’re not to go to the Café.’
    ‘But I’m so fond of whipped cream – and we never get any at
home.’ She was watching her father shrewdly and saw that he was no longer thinking of her. ‘And now I’m going to sleep, I’m so tired …’
    ‘Yes, go to sleep. And don’t tell tales, it’s not nice.’
    In the corridor he heard, more distinctly than ever, the grey stamping. It was just on four o’clock, feeding time. But first he would go to his sons’ room.
§ IV
    Three beds, three sleepers, three sons. They could be regarded as wealth, and so the father had hitherto regarded them. Not now, however, not now! There was something else besides Eva’s tittle-tattle that made Hackendahl stand on the threshold listening. Listening …
    He had heard hundreds, thousands of people sleeping. So he was familiar with this oppressed breathing; he had heard it in the barracks, mostly on Saturday and Sunday nights after leave, but he had never before heard it in this room. Eva’s words rushed into his mind. ‘Erich came home at one o’clock.’ But he needed no one to tell him what a drunken sleep sounded like.
    Although there was reason to complain about the way in which Heinz, the youngest (nicknamed Bubi), left his clothes lying around, and reason also to make the eldest, the twenty-four-year-old Otto, realize that his father knew he was not asleep – he lay much too stiffly – Hackendahl was now occupied only with his drunken son. Distraught with grief and anger, he stood by the bed of his Erich, his quick-witted boy … Erich was only seventeen but he was already in the second highest class at the grammar school; he was his parents’ favourite, the most popular boy in his class, a favourite also with his teachers. But he was drunk …
    The father stood there lost in thought, his foot on the bedside rug, if that’s what it was; there was no time to look. He must watch his son’s face, this much-loved face, and try to read its expression.
    But the light was still dim, so he went to the window and turned back a corner of the curtain, so that the already bright daylight shone full in the face of the sleeping boy.
    At the same time, the father’s gaze met another’s, that of Otto,
who looked at him darkly and a little troubled. Anger rose in Hackendahl, as if Otto had caught him doing something forbidden. And he completely gave way to his anger – you could do that with Otto. He was a milksop, apparently unmarked by either anger or love. Raising his fist as though to strike him, the father hissed: ‘Be quiet! Go to sleep at once! D’you hear?’
    The son closed his eyes immediately.
    For a moment, the father looked again at the pale, weak face with the thin beard. Then he turned back to his other son. But what had happened had changed him. Since knowing the eldest son was awake, he no longer felt alone in the room. The time for quiet contemplation was over. Anger, complaining and sadness had passed. Something had to happen.
    Something had to happen!
    First he bent down. Yes, he hadn’t paid attention, but he had noticed the clothes thrown drunkenly about. It wasn’t a bedside rug he’d stood on. And he began to pick up the clothes.
    Something dropped out of the waistcoat pocket and fell with a clink.
    First of all the old man hung the waistcoat in