Enno’s Eviction

With Borkhausen dispatched to Munich, Hetty Haberle and Enno Kluge sit in the Anhalter Bahnhof waiting room while she weighs whether they were followed. Enno, his courage returning now the danger seems past, mocks her for overpaying — 'he really has plucked you, Hetty!' — showing no gratitude. She recalls how Borkhausen sent a Hitler Youth boy for cigarettes on the way to the station and came back oddly indifferent to having failed; her unease lingers even after Enno dismisses it. Determined to get him properly hidden, she takes him to fetch his things, refusing his pleas to simply stay until Borkhausen returns. She plans to place him with her late husband's old comrade Anna Schönlein, concealing this and softening the arrangement only with money. Packing his suitcase, she slips in three hundred marks, resolved to pay Anna a hundred a day to keep him there, then carries the case to meet Enno at a pub near the Alex.

Fallada withholds Anna Schönlein's name from Enno, and from us until the reveal lands almost as an aside, a small structural choice that keeps the reader as unprotected as Hetty. Enno's ingratitude confirms what the earlier chapters implied: he is not worth what is being spent to save him.