Dirty Snow Read online

  And so, at that moment, that was all there was to it. Frank knew where he could lie in wait. In the rue Verte, which the Eunuch would have to take to get to the streetcar line from the Old Basin, there was an abandoned old building that was still called the tannery, although nothing had been tanned there for fifteen years. Frank himself had never known the tannery when it was running. People said that once, when it was on contract for the army, as many as six hundred men worked there.

  It was nothing now but great bare walls of black brick with high windows, like a church’s, opening at least six yards above the ground and with the glass all broken.

  An unlit blind alley a yard wide led from the tannery to the street.

  The nearest working streetlight—the city was full of twisted, broken ones—was far away, near the streetcar stop.

  So it was all too easy, not even exciting. He was there in the alley, his back against the brick wall of the tannery, and except for the shrill whistles of the trains on the other side of the river, around him was nothing but silence. Not a light in a window. Everyone was asleep.

  He could see, between the alley walls, a bit of the street, and it looked just like it had always looked in winter months. The snow along the sidewalks formed two grayish banks, one on the side of the houses, the other on the side of the street. Between the two banks was a narrow blackish path that people kept clear with salt or ashes. In front of each house this path was crossed by another leading to the street, which was deeply rutted with tire tracks.

  Nothing to it.

  Kill the Eunuch.

  Men in uniform were killed every week, and it was the patriotic organizations that got into trouble, the hostages, councilmen, notables, who were shot or taken God knows where. In any case, they were never heard of again.

  For Frank it was a question of killing his first man and breaking in Kromer’s Swedish knife.

  Nothing more.

  The only problem was that he would have to stand there up to his knees in the crusted snow—since no one had shoveled the alley—and feel the fingers of his right hand slowly stiffening in the cold. He had decided not to wear a glove.

  He wasn’t scared when he heard footsteps. He knew they weren’t the Eunuch’s, whose heavy boots would have made more of a crunching noise in the snow.

  He was interested, nothing more. The steps were too far apart to be those of a woman. It was long after curfew, and while for various reasons that didn’t bother people like himself or Kromer or any of Timo’s customers, no one in the neighborhood was in the habit of walking around at night.

  The man was nearing the alley, and already, even before seeing him, Frank knew, or guessed, who it was, which gave him a certain satisfaction.

  A little yellow light was flitting over the snow. It was the electric flashlight the man was swinging as he walked.

  That long, almost silent stride—at once soft and astonishingly rapid—that automatically evoked the figure of Frank’s neighbor Gerhardt Holst.

  The encounter became perfectly natural. Holst lived in the same building as Lotte, on the same floor. The door to his apartment was just opposite theirs. He was a streetcar conductor whose hours changed each week. Sometimes he would leave early in the morning before it was light; other times he would go down the stairs in midafternoon, invariably with his tin lunch box under his arm.

  He was very tall. His step was noiseless because he wore homemade boots of felt and rags. It was normal for a man who spent hours on the platform of a streetcar to try to keep his feet warm, yet for whatever reason Frank never saw those shapeless boots of blotting-paper gray—they seemed to have the texture of blotting paper, too—without feeling uncomfortable.

  The man was the same grayish color all over, as though made of the same material. He never seemed to look at anyone or to be interested in anything but the tin lunch box under his arm.

  Yet Frank would turn his head to avoid meeting the man’s eyes; at other times he would make a point of staring Holst aggressively in the face.

  Holst was going to pass by. And then?

  There was every chance he would keep going straight along, pushing before him the bright circle of his flashlight on the snow and the black path. There was no reason for Frank to make a noise. Pressed against the wall, he was practically invisible.

  Then why did he cough just when the man was about to reach the alley? He didn’t have a cold. His throat wasn’t dry. He had hardly smoked all evening.

  In fact, he coughed to attract attention. And it wasn’t even a threat. What possible interest could he have in threatening a poor man who drove a streetcar?

  Holst wasn’t a real streetcar conductor, though. It was obvious that he had come from somewhere else, that he and his daughter had led a different kind of life. The streets and the lines outside bakeries were full of people like that. Nobody turned to look at them anymore. And because they were ashamed of not being like everybody else, they assumed an air of humility.

  Still, Frank had coughed on purpose.

  Was it because of Sissy, Holst’s daughter? That didn’t make sense. He wasn’t in love with Sissy. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t mean anything to him at all. He meant something to her, though.

  Didn’t she open the door when she heard him coming up the stairs, whistling? Didn’t she run to the window whenever he went out, hadn’t he seen the curtain stir?

  If he wanted to, he could have her anytime he felt like it. Maybe it would require patience and a show of good manners, but that wasn’t hard to pull off.

  The astonishing thing was that Sissy certainly knew who he was and what his mother did for a living. The whole building despised them. Not many people said hello.

  Holst didn’t say anything to them either, but then he never said anything to anyone. Out of pride. No, more out of humility, or because he couldn’t be bothered with other people, because he lived with his daughter in a little circle from which he felt no need to step outside. Some people were like that.

  He wasn’t even mysterious.

  Had Frank perhaps coughed out of childish impulse? That was too simple, too pat.

  Holst wasn’t scared. His step didn’t falter. It never occurred to him that someone might be waiting for him in the alley. That was odd, too, since a man would have to have a good reason for flattening himself against a wall in the middle of the night, with the thermometer at ten degrees below freezing.

  As he passed the alley, Holst raised his flashlight for an instant, just long enough to light up Frank’s face.

  Frank didn’t bother to raise the collar of his coat or turn his head aside. He stood there in plain sight with that thoughtful and resolute air that he usually had, even when thinking about the most trivial things.

  Holst had seen him and knew him. He was no more than a hundred yards from the apartment building. He was taking the key out of his pocket. Because he worked nights, he was the only tenant who had one.

  Tomorrow he would learn from the papers—or simply while standing in line in front of some shop—that a noncommissioned officer had been killed at the corner of the alley.

  Then he would know.

  What would he decide to do? The Occupation authorities would offer a reward, as they always did when one of their own was in question, especially an officer. Holst and his daughter were poor. They couldn’t afford meat more than a couple of times a month, and even then only odd scraps they boiled with turnips. From the odors escaping through the doors, you could tell who in the building ate what.

  What would Holst do?

  He definitely couldn’t be happy to have a business like Lotte’s going on just across the hall from his apartment, not with Sissy there all day long.

  Wasn’t this a chance to get rid of them?

  Yet Frank had coughed, and not for a moment did he consider abandoning his plan. On the contrary—for a second he mouthed a sort of prayer that the Eunuch would turn the corner of the street before Holst had had time to enter the building.<
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  Holst would hear him, would see him. Perhaps he’d wait a moment with his key in his hand and even see the thing done.

  That didn’t happen. Too bad—Frank had been excited by the idea. It seemed that there was already a secret bond between him and the man now climbing the stairs in the dark building.

  Of course it wasn’t because of Holst that he was going to kill the Eunuch. That had already been decided.

  It was just that, at that moment, his act had made no sense. It had been almost a joke, a childish prank. What was it he had said? Like losing his virginity.

  Right now there was something else he wanted, that he accepted with open eyes.

  There was Holst, Sissy, and himself. The noncommissioned officer fell into the background; Kromer and his pal Berg were completely unimportant.

  There was Holst and himself.

  And it was really as though he had just chosen Holst, as though he had always known that things would turn out this way, because he wouldn’t have done it for anyone but the streetcar conductor.

  A half-hour later, he knocked at Timo’s, on the little door at the back of the alley, just like everyone else. Timo himself opened the door. There was hardly anyone left, and one of the girls who had been drinking with the Eunuch was vomiting into the kitchen sink.

  “Has Kromer left?”

  “Ah! Yes … He said to tell you that he had an appointment in the Upper Town …”

  The knife, carefully wiped, was in Frank’s pocket. Timo paid no attention to it and went on rinsing glasses.

  “You want something to drink?”

  He almost said yes. But he preferred to prove to himself that he wasn’t nervous, that he didn’t need alcohol. Yet he had had to stab the noncommissioned officer twice because of all the fat larding his back. Now the automatic made a bulge in Frank’s other pocket.

  Should he show it to Timo? There was no danger. Timo would keep quiet. But that was too easy. It’s what someone else would have done.

  “Good night.”

  “Are you sleeping at your mother’s?”

  Frank was in the habit of sleeping almost anywhere, sometimes in the little building behind Timo’s where the girls boarded; sometimes at Kromer’s, who had a nice room with a couch; sometimes with others, if things turned out. But there was always a cot for him in Lotte’s kitchen.

  “I’m going home.”

  That was dangerous because of the body still lying across the pavement. It would be even more dangerous to make a detour by way of the main street—toward the bridge—since in that direction he might run into a patrol.

  The dark heap was still on the sidewalk, half on the path, half in the pile of snow, and Frank stepped over it. It was the only moment he felt frightened. Not only of hearing footsteps behind him but of seeing the Eunuch get up again.

  He rang and waited some time for the concierge to push the button at the head of his bed and open the door. He went up the first flights quickly, then slackened his pace, and finally, just as he reached Holst’s apartment, where a light showed under the door, he began to whistle to let Holst know it was him.

  He didn’t go in to see his mother, who was a heavy sleeper. He undressed in the kitchen, where he had turned on the lamp. He lay down. The room smelled so strongly of soup and leeks that it kept him awake.

  So he got up, cracked the door into the back room, and shrugged.

  Bertha was sleeping there that night. Her big, unappetizing body was hot. He shoved her aside and she grunted, stretching out her arm, which he had to move to one side to make room for himself.

  A little later, when he was about take her, since he couldn’t fall asleep, he thought of Sissy, who must be a virgin.

  Would her father tell her what Frank had done?

  2

  WHEN BERTHA got out of bed, he woke up a little, opening his eyes just enough to see great flowers of frost on the windowpanes.

  In her bare feet, the big girl went to turn on the switch in the kitchen, leaving the door open so that the bedroom was faintly illuminated by the reflected light. And he could hear her at the other end of the room, putting on her stockings, her slip, her dress, then finally going out and closing the door. The next sound would be the scraping of the poker over the grate on the other side of the partition.

  His mother knew how to train them. She always made sure one of them slept in the apartment. Not for the clients, since nobody came up after eight o’clock in the evening, when the outside door was locked. But Lotte needed company. What she really needed was to be waited on.

  “I starved enough when I was young and stupid to deserve a little comfort now. Everyone gets their day.”

  It was always the stupidest and poorest girl she kept in the apartment, with the excuse that the girl lived too far away, that there was a fire here, and that she would have a good dinner.

  For each of them there was the same dressing gown of violet flannel that usually dragged on the floor behind them. They were invariably between sixteen and eighteen. Older than that, Lotte didn’t want them. And, with rare exceptions, she never kept them more than a month.

  The clients liked variety. It was pointless to tell the girls in advance. They thought they’d found a home, particularly the ones who were fresh from the country, the ones who almost always came to live in the apartment.

  Lotte must have been lying in bed, too, listening like Frank, who was only half asleep, aware of the time, of where he was, of the noises in the apartment and in the street. He was unconsciously waiting for the clatter of the first streetcar, which he would hear a long way off in the frozen emptiness of the streets, picturing its big yellow headlight in his mind’s eye.

  Then almost immediately came the clank of the two coal scuttles. Mornings were hardest for the girls on duty. One of them—and she had been a strapping big girl, too—had even left because of this forced labor. They had to take the two black iron scuttles down three flights of stairs, down another flight to the cellar, then bring them, full, all the way back.

  Everybody in the building got up early. It was like a house of phantoms, since power restrictions and the frequent out-ages forced people to use only the dimmest electric bulbs. In addition, they had no gas—just the barest flicker, hardly enough to heat their acorn coffee.

  Each time the girl went out with the coal scuttles, Frank listened, and Lotte must have done the same from her bed.

  Each tenant had his own cellar with a padlock. But who else had any coal or wood?

  When the girl came up the stairs with her scuttles full, arms strained and face puffy, doors cracked open as she struggled by. Hard looks were cast at her and her scuttles. Women exchanged loud remarks. Once a tenant on the third floor— he had since been shot, but not for that—had kicked over the scuttles, growling, “Whore!”

  From the top of the barracks—and the building really did look like a barracks—to the bottom, they were all muffled up in overcoats and two or three sweaters, most of them wearing gloves. And there were children who had to be gotten ready for school.

  Bertha went down. Bertha wasn’t afraid. She was one of the few who had held out for more than six weeks, perhaps because she was strong and docile.

  But she was worthless for sex. She let out such a strange howl that men were put off.

  “A cow,” thought Frank.

  As, about Kromer, he thought, “A young bull.”

  They ought to be mated. Bertha lighted the fires in the two stoves as well as one in the bedroom, leaving the door to the kitchen once again ajar. There were four fires in the apartment, more than in all the rest of the building together, all for them alone. Maybe one day people would stand with their backs against the apartment’s outer wall to steal a little of their heat.

  Did Sissy Holst have a fire?

  He knew how it was—he knew about the little blue flames coming out of the gas burners, and only between seven and eight in the morning.

  People warmed their fingers on the teakettle. Some reste
d their feet on the heater or pressed themselves against it. All of them bundled up in whatever old clothes they could find, piling them on their backs, anything on top of anything.

  Sissy? Why had he thought about her?

  In the building across the street, an even poorer one than theirs since it was older and more dilapidated, people had stuck wrapping paper over the windows to keep out the cold, leaving only small holes in the paper for light and to see outside.

  Could they see the Eunuch? Had the body been found?

  There wouldn’t be any fuss. There never was. Many people had already left for work, and now the women were going out to stand in lines.

  Barring an unlikely patrol—they almost never came to the rue Verte, which led practically nowhere—the first ones, the early risers, who had seen the dark mass lying undisturbed in the snow had probably hurried on to the streetcar stop.

  The others, now that it was light, would be able to make out the color of the uniform. They would be in an even greater hurry to get away.

  It would be one of the concierges. They were all functionaries of a sort. They couldn’t pretend not to have seen anything. Each had a telephone in the hall of his apartment building.

  An odor of burning kindling came from the kitchen. Then there was an avalanche of ashes in the other stoves and, finally, the hum of the coffee grinder.

  Poor fat stupid Bertha! A little while ago she had stood in her bare feet on the carpet, rubbing her body to smooth away the marks of the sheets on her skin. She hadn’t put on her underwear. She was sweating. She was probably talking to herself. Two months earlier, at this same hour, she would have been feeding chickens and probably talking to them in a language they understood.

  The streetcar again—its sudden stop at the corner to pour sand on the rails so the brake would hold. You got used to it, and yet you still waited in suspense for it to go away again with its noise like the rattle of scrap iron.

  Which of the concierges would be frightened enough to telephone the authorities? Concierges lived in fear. It was their vocation. You could picture this one or that gesticulating in front of two or three carloads of Occupation police.