Ruth

Ruth’s brief appearance in the narrative exposes the vulnerability of a woman living in extreme deprivation, while the encounter with Fiete turns an offer of food into a fatal sequence of coercion and violence.

Encounter and Circumstances

Ruth is shivering outside the Aladin cinema when Fiete approaches her. Asked what she is doing there, she answers that she is doing nothing. She has gone without food for two or three days, perhaps as long as a week, and Fiete offers to buy her a sausage. At a food stand by the Davidwache, he buys her one, then another, and finally a third. They leave together without needing to make any particular arrangement: the immediate promise of food is enough to draw her into his company.

Her speech is badly slurred. The narrative attributes this partly to her missing teeth and partly to an indistinct dialect. Once drunk, she tears off the plaster on her chin and scratches at the infected wound beneath it, then sticks the plaster back on. Fiete watches uneasily, noticing that it appears to have been pulled off and reapplied several times. The repeated gesture gives a small, concrete measure of the neglect and physical hardship surrounding her.

Appearance and Recurrent Despair

The narration presents Ruth through the distance between a remembered youth and her present condition. She is just under five feet three inches tall, sturdy and stocky, and arthritis has deformed her right hand. The thought that she was once a cute young woman, someone men quickly fell for, is difficult even for Fiete to imagine; the contrast makes visible how far her current life has carried her from that earlier possibility.

Her despair has already brought her close to death. On her fifty-second birthday, Ruth intended to jump into the harbor, but a man spoke to her and she went with him instead. She postponed the attempt until the next day, and the decision kept shifting back and forth. The account gives no clean break between crisis and reprieve: interruption buys time, but does not resolve the wish to die.

Coercion and Death

In bed, Fiete Honka sees how dirty Ruth is and recoils from her body, but his revulsion does not keep him from turning her into the object of violent sexual fantasies. While she sleeps, he imagines using firecrackers to blow her apart and dreams of becoming more notorious than Jack the Ripper. The fantasies fuse sexual domination with a craving for fame: Ruth’s vulnerable body becomes, in his imagination, a means of forcing the attention he believes he is owed.

When Ruth says that she does not want sex and that even slight pressure causes her severe abdominal pain, Fiete assumes she is pretending and continues to handle her. She resists: she bites him and strikes him on the head with the partly full bottle of liquor. Her fury is also directed at his insistence that he has given her syphilis, an accusation the narrative says is untrue. Fiete interprets her refusal as deceit rather than a boundary, and her physical resistance does not end the danger.

Ruth runs to the kitchen and takes the revolver she has seen in the apartment, holding it to her temple and firing. She survives the shot. Fiete leads her to the bed, presses a towel against the wound, lies beside her, and falls asleep. When he wakes and finds her still alive, he tightens a cloth around her neck and kills her. The sequence turns his earlier fantasy of controlling Ruth’s body into action, while her attempt to escape his violence ends in his killing her.

With no room left in the storage alcove, Fiete moves Ruth’s remains to the attic. He cuts them apart to fit into two plastic bags, hides the packages beneath the sloping roof, and covers the blood on the floor with coal dust. The concealment follows the killing as a practical continuation of it: Ruth is reduced to hidden parcels, and the domestic space is treated as something that can be cleaned and managed. Her story closes not with the earlier postponement of her suicide resolved, but with her death at Fiete’s hands after she has tried to resist him and then to kill herself.

Narrative Function and Ethical Contrast

Ruth’s place in the episode is defined by a stark contrast between how Fiete sees her and what the account allows the reader to know. He registers her through signs of physical decline and turns her body into material for fantasies of sexual power and notoriety. Yet the narrative also gives her a history of recurring despair, the immediate need that makes three sausages consequential, and a clear refusal when she is in pain. Those details resist the reduction of her to the grotesque figure Fiete imagines: her suffering is not a license for his violence, and her resistance is not evidence of the deceit he projects onto her.

The sequence also returns, in altered form, to Ruth’s earlier postponement of suicide. Then, another person’s approach interrupted her plan and deferred it; now, after she has tried to escape Fiete by shooting herself, he first tends her wound and then kills her. The recurrence does not produce rescue or resolution. Instead, Ruth’s repeated proximity to death reveals how little protection an interruption can offer when the person beside her is also the source of danger. Her final fate stands against Fiete’s fantasies of fame: the attention he seeks is imagined as spectacle, while Ruth is hidden from view, her remains concealed beneath the attic roof.