The Snow Was Dirty Read online

  All that was there now were big bare walls of black brick with high windows like church windows, which didn’t start until six metres from the ground and all of whose panes were broken.

  A dark alley, barely a metre wide, leading to a dead end, separated the tannery from the rest of the street.

  The nearest lighted streetlamp – the city was full of twisted or smashed streetlamps – was a long way away, at the tram stop.

  So it was quite simple, it didn’t arouse any emotion in him. There he was, in the alley, back pressed up against the brick wall of the tannery, and apart from the mournful cries of the trains on the other side of the river, there was nothing but silence around him. Not a light in the windows. People were asleep.

  Between the two walls, he could see part of a street, and it was the street as he had always known it during the winter months: on the pavements, the snow formed two greyish lines, one on the side of the buildings, the other on the side of the road; between the two, a narrow, blackish path, which people maintained with sand, salt or ashes. In front of each door, this path was cut across by another path leading to the roadway, where the tracks of wheels were deeper in some places than in others.

  Quite simple.

  Kill the Eunuch . . .

  Uniformed men were killed every week, and it was patriotic organizations that were harassed; there would be hostages, councillors or other important people would be shot or taken away, never to be heard of again.

  As far as Frank was concerned, it was all about killing his first man and trying out Kromer’s Swedish knife.

  Nothing more than that.

  The one thing that bothered him was being up to his knees in hardened snow – because nobody ever thought of removing the snow from the alley – and feeling the fingers of his right hand get stiffer and stiffer. But he had decided not to keep his glove on.

  He wasn’t nervous when he heard footsteps. He knew it wasn’t his sergeant. With his heavy boots, the sergeant would have made the snow crunch more.

  He was intrigued, no more than that. The strides were too long to be a woman’s. The curfew had started a long time ago. For a whole lot of reasons, that didn’t bother people like him, like Kromer, like Timo’s customers, but those who lived in the neighbourhood weren’t in the habit of venturing out at night.

  The man was coming closer to the alley and already, even before seeing him, Frank knew, or rather guessed, and the fact that he had guessed gave him a kind of satisfaction.

  It was because of the little yellow light swaying on the snow, the light of a torch the man was moving from side to side as he walked.

  That long, almost silent stride, those steps at once soft and surprisingly fast, automatically made Frank think of his neighbour Gerhardt Holst.

  It was quite natural that they should meet. Holst lived in the same building as Lotte, on the same floor. The door of his apartment was just opposite theirs. He was a tram driver, and his work schedule changed every week; sometimes, he left very early in the morning, before daybreak; at other times, he would descend the stairs in mid-afternoon, invariably with his tin box under his arm.

  He was very tall. His steps were silent, because he wore boots he had made himself, with felt and pieces of rag. It is natural that a man who spends hours on the platform of a tram should try to keep his feet warm, and yet Frank, for no particular reason, couldn’t see those shapeless boots, as grey as blotting paper – they seemed to have the texture of blotting paper – without a kind of unease.

  The man was a uniform grey, as if made of the same material all over. He never seemed to look at anybody, or be interested in anything, only in his tin box, which he kept under his arm and which contained his meal.

  And yet Frank would turn his head away to avoid his gaze, or at other times deliberately look Holst in the eyes with an aggressive air.

  Holst was about to pass by. What of it?

  There was every chance he would go on his way, throwing the circle of light from his torch on to the snow and the black path in front of him. Frank had no reason to make any noise. With his back up against the wall, he was practically invisible.

  So why did he cough just as 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.

  When it came down to it, he coughed to attract attention. It wasn’t even by way of a challenge! Where was the interest in challenging a poor man who drives a tram?

  Admittedly, Holst wasn’t a real tram driver. It was obvious he was from somewhere else, and that he and his daughter had led a different life. The streets are full of people like that. You see them in the queues outside the bakeries and you never give them a second glance. They are the ones who are ashamed at not feeling quite like the others and who assume a humble air.

  The fact remains that Frank deliberately coughed.

  Is it because of Holst’s daughter Sissy? That wouldn’t make any sense. He isn’t in love with Sissy. She is a little thing of sixteen who doesn’t impress him. He knows, though, that he impresses her.

  Doesn’t she sometimes half open her door when she hears him whistling as he climbs the stairs? Doesn’t she run to the window when he goes out, and doesn’t he see her move the curtain?

  If he wanted her, he could have her whenever he liked. With a bit of patience maybe, and some manners, which isn’t difficult.

  The most surprising part of it is that Sissy must know who he is, and what profession his mother practises. The whole building despises them. Not many people even say hello to them.

  Holst doesn’t say hello to him either, but then he doesn’t say hello to anyone. Not out of pride. Out of humility, rather, or because he is not interested in people, because he lives with his daughter in a little circle he feels no need to leave. There are people like that!

  He isn’t even mysterious.

  Maybe it was simply out of playfulness that Frank coughed? It was too easy otherwise, too smooth.

  Holst hasn’t caught fright. He hasn’t slowed down. He hasn’t thought it might be him that someone is waiting to ambush in the alley. That is quite curious, too, because after all a man doesn’t flatten himself against a wall, in the middle of the night, in a temperature of twenty below zero, for no reason!

  All he does, as he passes the alley, is change the direction of his torch, just for a moment, long enough to light up Frank’s face.

  Frank hasn’t even bothered to lift the collar of his coat, or turn his head away. So he is quite exposed, with that pensive, resolute air he always has, even when he is thinking only about trivial things.

  Holst has seen him and recognized him. He only has 800 metres to go to get home. He will take his key from his pocket: thanks to his night work, he is the only one of the tenants to have a key.

  Tomorrow, he will find out from the newspapers – or simply standing in a queue outside some shop or other – that the sergeant was killed on the corner of the alley.

  And then he will know.

  What will he decide to do? The occupiers will announce a reward, as usual when one of their men is killed, especially when it is an officer. Holst and his daughter are poor, they probably don’t eat meat more than once a fortnight, and most often it is just scraps to be boiled with swedes. Thanks to the smells escaping through the doors, it is possible to tell what the people in each apartment eat.

  What will Holst do?

  He can’t be happy to see a trade like Lotte’s being plied just opposite his apartment, where Sissy spends her days.

  Isn’t it an opportunity to get rid of them?

  And yet Frank coughed and doesn’t dream for a moment of giving up his plan. On the contrary! For a few moments, he practically prays that the sergeant will turn the corner of the street before Holst has had time to get home.

  Holst would hear him, see him. Maybe he would wait a moment, with his key in his hand, and so become a witness?

  That doesn’t happen. A pity! Frank was quite excited at the t
hought of it. Already it seems to him that there is a secret link between him and the man who is now climbing the stairs in the dark building.

  It isn’t because of Holst that he is going to kill the Eunuch, of course: that was decided before.

  But at that point, his act was meaningless. It was almost a joke, a playful prank. What did he call it? A loss of virginity.

  Now, though, it is something else he wants, something that he accepts, in full awareness of the facts.

  There is Holst, Sissy and him. The sergeant fades into the background. Kromer and his pal Berg don’t matter any more.

  There is Holst and him.

  It is really as if he chose Holst, as if he always knew that this would happen at a given moment, because he wouldn’t have done it for anybody else apart from the tram driver.

  Half an hour later, he was at Timo’s, knocking at the little door at the end of the lane, in the agreed way. Timo opened the door himself. There was almost nobody there now, and one of the girls who had been drinking earlier with the Eunuch was throwing up into the kitchen sink.

  ‘Has Kromer gone?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He told me to let you know he had an appointment in the upper town.’

  The knife was in Frank’s pocket, wiped clean. Timo was rinsing glasses, paying no attention to Frank.

  ‘You having a drink?’

  He almost answered yes. But he preferred to prove to himself that he wasn’t agitated, that he didn’t need alcohol. And yet it had taken him two attempts, because of the layer of fat on the sergeant’s back. The revolver was swelling his other pocket.

  Should he show it to Timo? There was no danger. Timo would keep quiet. But it was too easy. It was what everyone would have done.

  ‘Goodnight!’

  ‘Are you sleeping at your mother’s?’

  He slept in all kinds of places, sometimes in the little house behind Timo’s, where the girls rented rooms, sometimes at Kromer’s – Kromer had a nice room with a divan – sometimes at other people’s houses, taking pot luck. But there was always a camp bed for him in Lotte’s kitchen.

  ‘I’m going home.’

  It was dangerous, because of the body still lying across the pavement. It was more dangerous to go the long way round by the main street – coming back across the bridge – because over there, he might run into a patrol.

  The dark heap was still on the pavement, partly on the black path, partly on the heap of snow, and Frank stepped over it. It was the only moment when he was afraid. Not only of hearing footsteps behind him, but of seeing the Eunuch get up again, for example.

  He rang the bell and waited a while for the caretaker to open the door by pressing the button at the head of his bed. He climbed the first steps quite quickly, then slowed down and finally, just as he was passing Holst’s door, under which light was filtering, he started to whistle, to let them know it was him.

  He didn’t go into his mother’s room: she was a deep sleeper. He undressed in the kitchen, where he had lit the lamp. He lay down. The place smelled of soup and leeks, and the odour was so strong it stopped him from sleeping.

  So he got up, half opened the door at the back and shrugged.

  It was Bertha who was occupying the bed tonight. Her big, insipid body was quite warm. He pushed her from behind, and she groaned and reached out an arm, which he had to fold over to make room for himself.

  Sometime later, he almost had sex with her, because he couldn’t get to sleep, but then he thought of Sissy, who must be a virgin.

  Would her father tell her what Frank had done that night?

  2.

  When Bertha got out of bed, he half woke and opened his eyes just wide enough to see big flowers of frost on the windowpanes.

  Barefoot, Bertha went to the kitchen and switched on the light, leaving the door ajar, so that the bedroom was lit only by the reflected glow. Then he heard her putting on her stockings, underwear and dressing gown at the far end of the room and finally leaving and shutting the door behind her. The next noise would be the scraping of the poker on the grate next door.

  His mother knew how to tame them. She was always careful to keep at least one in the house overnight. Not because of the clients: nobody came up after eight o’clock at night, when the downstairs door was closed. But Lotte needed company. Above all, she needed to be served.

  ‘I starved enough when I was young and stupid; now I can afford to take it easy. It’s their turn now.’

  It was always the poorest and meekest she kept behind, on the pretext that they lived too far, that there was a fire or that she had made a good dinner.

  All of them were given the same purple flannelette dressing gown to wear, which was too long for most of them and trailed on the ground. They were invariably between sixteen and eighteen years old. Lotte did not want them older. And with a few rare exceptions, she never kept them more than a month.

  Clients love change. It was pointless telling that to the girls in advance. They felt they were at home, especially those from the country, and it was almost always they who stayed the night.

  Lotte must be doing the same as Frank, who was only half asleep, aware of the time, the place where he was, the noises in the apartment and the noises on the street. In this way, he listened mechanically for the din of the first tram, which could be heard coming from a long way away in the frozen emptiness of the streets, and imagined he could actually see the big yellow light.

  This was immediately followed by the clatter of the two coal buckets. That was the hardest thing in the morning for the girl on duty. One of them, even though she was a strong, muscular girl, had actually left because of having to perform that chore. What they had to do was climb down three floors with the two black metal buckets, then another floor into the cellar, and come back up again with both buckets full.

  Everyone in the building got up early; it was like a house of ghosts because, thanks to the restrictions and the power cuts, people only used very weak electric bulbs these days. On top of that, they didn’t have fire and dared use only a tiny bit of gas to heat their acorn coffee.

  Every time the coal buckets were taken down, Frank would listen out, and Lotte was probably doing the same in her bed.

  Each tenant had his own cellar, closed by a padlock. But who apart from them had coal or wood?

  When the girl came back up with the buckets, arms stretched, face flushed, there were almost always doors that half opened as she passed and eyes that stared harshly at her, and at the buckets. Women exchanged comments out loud. Once, a tenant on the second floor – he had been shot since, but not for that – had knocked over the two buckets, muttering, ‘Whore!’

  All of them, from top to bottom of the barracks – because the building was like a barracks – would still be muffled in their overcoats, with two or three cardigans, most with their gloves on. And the children had to go to school.

  Bertha had gone down. Bertha wasn’t afraid. She was one of the few, perhaps because she was strong and placid, to have held out for more than six weeks.

  But she was useless when it came to lovemaking. She sometimes let out such a strange howl that the man was unable to go all the way.

  ‘A cow!’ Frank always thought, just as he thought of Kromer as a young bull.

  They would have made a good couple. Bertha was lighting the fires in the stoves, including the one in the bedroom, once again leaving the kitchen door ajar. There were four fires in the apartment, more than in all the rest of the building, four fires just for them. Maybe one day people would stand outside in the corridor and filch a bit of heat by pressing themselves flat against their wall?

  Did Sissy Holst have fire?

  He knew how it was; he was familiar with that little blue flame emerging from the gas stove, and only between seven and eight in the morning.

  People warmed their fingers at the kettle. There were some who put their feet, or their stomachs, on the stove. And all of them covered themselves in cast-offs, in everything they could
heap on their backs, one thing on top of another.

  Sissy?

  Why had he thought about Sissy?

  In the building opposite, which was poorer than theirs, because it was older and already dilapidated, people had stuck wrapping paper on the windows to keep out the cold, leaving only little holes in the paper to let in the light and to look out.

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

  It would happen without fuss. There was never any fuss. A lot of people had already left for work, and the women were going out to take their places in the queues.

  Unless there was a patrol, which was unlikely – there are almost never any patrols in Green Street, which leads practically nowhere – the early risers had seen the dark heap on the snow and hurried to the tram stop.

  Now that daylight had come, the others could probably make out the colour of the uniform, which would make them all the more anxious to get away.

  It would come about through one of the caretakers. Caretakers are like civil servants. They can’t pretend they haven’t seen anything. They have telephones at their disposal, in the corridors of their buildings.

  A smell of burning tinder came from the kitchen. Then there were avalanches of ash in the other stoves and, finally, the music of the coffee mill.

  Poor dumb Bertha! Earlier, standing barefoot on the rug, she had rubbed her whole body in order to smooth out the folds made on her skin by the sheets. She hadn’t put on trousers. She was glistening with sweat. She must be talking to herself. Two months earlier, at this hour, she had been feeding the hens, probably talking to them in a language they understood.

  And always the tram, coming to an abrupt halt at the corner of the street, spitting sand on the rails as it braked. They were used to it, and yet it was as if they were held in suspense, waiting for it to leave again in a clatter of iron.

  Which of the caretakers had been scared enough to phone the authorities? Caretakers are always scared. It is their job. It was easy to imagine this one gesticulating at two or three cars full of occupiers.