Dirty Snow Read online

  There was a time when they would have sealed off the entire neighborhood and searched the houses one by one. They’d have taken hostages, too. That time was long past. Men had become philosophers, it appeared, on both sides of the divide. But was there still a divide?

  Well, they would go on pretending.

  A fat letch was dead. What difference could it make to them? They must have known he was worthless. The disappearance of the pistol would disturb them much more, because whoever had taken it might have ideas about using it against them.

  They were frightened, too. Everybody was frightened.

  Two cars, three cars passed, then passed again. Another was going from house to house.

  It was for effect only. Nothing would happen.

  Unless, of course, Holst decided to talk. But Holst wouldn’t talk. Frank had faith in him.

  That’s it! Now he had the explanation. It wasn’t the precise expression perhaps, but it gave an idea of what he had dimly thought the night before: he had faith in Holst.

  Holst must be asleep. No. By this time he was up and getting ready to go out. When he wasn’t working he stood in the lines.

  They had to stand in line, too, at Lotte’s, for a few commodities. One of the girls did, that is. But not for everything. There were certain things that were well worth fetching yourself.

  All the doors inside were open. The kitchen stove radiated heat through the rooms. If necessary, it would have been enough to heat the whole place. Then the smell of real coffee filled the apartment.

  On the other side of the kitchen, opening onto the landing, just to the left of the stairs, was the nail salon. The stove there was always lit.

  And each stove, each fire had its own particular smell, its own life, its own way of breathing, its own particular noises. The one in the salon smelled like linoleum and lit the room with its well-polished furniture, upright piano, and embroidered or crocheted doilies on side tables and on the arms of chairs.

  “The worst lechers,” Lotte always said, “are the bourgeois. And the bourgeois like to do their dirty business in an atmosphere that reminds them of home.”

  That was why the two manicure tables were so small as to be invisible. And why Lotte taught the girls to play the piano with one finger.

  “Like their daughters, you understand.”

  The bedroom, the big bedroom, as he called it, where Lotte was sleeping at that moment, was swathed in carpets and curtains and strewn with bric-a-brac.

  Another thing Lotte always said was, “If I could only hang portraits of their fathers and mothers, wives and children in there, I’d make millions!”

  Had they finally taken away the Eunuch’s body? Probably. The coming and going of the cars had stopped.

  Gerhardt Holst, his long nose blue with cold, shopping bag in his hand, was probably standing motionless and dignified in line somewhere in the neighborhood. Some people accepted that sort of thing, others refused to. Frank hadn’t accepted it. He wouldn’t stand in line for anything in the world.

  “Everyone else does but you,” his mother had said to him. She thought he was too proud.

  Could anyone imagine Kromer standing in line? Or Timo? Any of those people?

  Didn’t Lotte have coal? And when Lotte got up in the morning, wasn’t food her first thought?

  “In my house you eat!” she had once replied to a girl who had never been a prostitute before and was asking how much she would earn at Lotte’s.

  And it was true. You ate. You didn’t just eat, you stuffed yourself. You stuffed yourself from morning to night. There was always food on the kitchen table. A whole family could have survived on their leftovers.

  It had become a sort of game to think up dishes that were the most difficult to prepare, dishes full of fat or other ingredients that were almost impossible to find. It was a sport.

  “Bacon? Go ask Kopotzki, and say I sent you. Tell him I’ll bring him sugar.”

  And if they wanted mushrooms?

  “Take the streetcar and go to Blang’s. Tell him …”

  Each meal was a game. A game and an act of defiance, since everyone in the building got whiffs of the cooking floating through keyholes and under doors. People were almost tempted to leave their doors open. Meanwhile the Holsts put up with a bone garnished with turnips.

  What made him keep coming back to the Holsts? He got up. He was sick of lying in bed. He went to the kitchen, rubbing his sleepy eyes. It was eleven o’clock. A girl he didn’t know had just arrived, a new one, quiet and proper-looking, who hadn’t taken her hat off yet and who was wearing a white, feminine blouse.

  “Don’t be afraid of helping yourself to sugar,” Lotte urged, still in her dressing gown with her elbows on the table, drinking her coffee in little sips.

  It was always that way at first. They had to be tamed. In the beginning they didn’t dare touch a thing. They looked at a piece of sugar as though it were something precious. It was the same with the milk, with everything. And after a certain time they had to be sent away because they stole from the cupboards. Although, granted, they would have been sent away in any case.

  They were well behaved. They sat with their knees together. Most of them wore little tailored suits like Sissy, with dark skirts and white blouses.

  “If only they stayed like that!”

  That’s what the clients liked.

  None of this early-morning sloppiness, for instance. Still, who knows? There they were, one big happy family, un-washed, their faces shiny, drinking coffee, eating anything they liked, smoking cigarettes, doing nothing.

  “Will you iron my pants?” Frank asked his mother.

  And, because the outlet was in the salon, Lotte set up the ironing board there between two armchairs.

  What about the Eunuch?

  Some of the neighbors were in a panic because of what he’d done, the ones who had seen the body in the snow that morning. Because of it, they wouldn’t have an easy moment all day.

  Frank’s only worry was the automatic. At about nine he had climbed out of bed for a moment with the idea of putting it in the pocket of his overcoat and hiding it later.

  But where? And who should he be hiding it from?

  Bertha was too easygoing to let anything slip, except out of stupidity.

  The other one, the little one in the suit whose name he didn’t yet know, would keep quiet because she was new, because she was in their house, and because she was hungry.

  As for his mother, he didn’t worry about her. He was the boss. She tried to rebel at times, but in the end she knew that she would always do what Frank wanted.

  He wasn’t tall. In fact, he was short. Once—but that was a long time ago—he had worn high heels, almost as high as a woman’s, to make himself look taller. He wasn’t big either, though he was well built and square-shouldered.

  He was fair-complexioned, like Lotte, with blond hair and blue-gray eyes.

  So why were the girls afraid of him? He wasn’t even nineteen. There were moments when he seemed like a child. Perhaps he was capable of tenderness. For the most part he didn’t bother.

  And what was most surprising, given his age, was his poise. When he was still a baby, hardly able to walk, with a big head and yellow curls, people used to say that he looked like a little man.

  He never seemed to get excited. He never gesticulated. It was rare to see him in a hurry or angry, and rarer still to hear him raise his voice.

  One of the girls, whose bed he had often shared, took his head in her arms and asked him why he was so unhappy.

  She refused to believe him when, pulling away, he answered curtly, “I’m not unhappy. I’ve never been unhappy in my life.”

  Perhaps it was true. He wasn’t unhappy, but he felt no desire to laugh or joke around. He always stayed calm, and maybe that disconcerted people.

  And now, thinking about Holst, he was perfectly calm, without the slightest anxiety. He was barely even interested in Holst.

  Here everyone drank cof
fee with sugar in it and real cream. They spread butter and jam and honey on their bread. The bread was almost white. The only other place in the neighborhood to find it was at Timo’s.

  What did they eat in the apartment across the hall? What did Gerhardt Holst eat? What did Sissy eat?

  “You’ve hardly had any breakfast,” remarked Lotte, who had gorged herself as usual.

  In the old days, when the others had food, she had often been so hungry that now she was afraid of his not eating enough. She wanted to stuff him like a goose.

  He hadn’t enough energy to get dressed. Besides, at this hour there was nothing to do outside. He sat around. He watched Lotte carefully ironing his trousers and removing some spots with the tip of her painted nails. Then he followed the new girl with his eyes. He watched her set up the little table with the manicure implements she didn’t know how to use.

  On the nape of her neck, which was still thin, with very fine white skin that reminded him of a chicken, there were a few stray hairs she kept twisting in an unconscious gesture.

  Sissy did the same thing when she was going up or down the stairs.

  The new girl called him “Monsieur Frank.” Lotte had told her to. Out of politeness he asked her what her name was.

  “Minna.”

  Her skirt was well tailored, the material almost new, and she seemed clean. Had she slept with men before? Probably, or she wouldn’t have come to Lotte’s. But she probably had never done it with anyone for money.

  Later on, when a customer showed up, Frank would climb on the kitchen table. He was sure that after she had taken off her dress she would turn toward the wall. She would finger the straps of her slip for a long time before making up her mind to take it off.

  Sissy was just across the landing. At the top of the stairs, there was a door on the right and another on the left before you came to the corridor where there were still more doors. Some tenants had a whole apartment. Others only had one room. There were three more stories above them. You could hear people going up and down the stairs all the time. The women carried shopping bags and packages, and as time went on they had more and more trouble climbing the stairs. There was one who couldn’t have been more than thirty, and yet she had fainted on the stairs a few months back.

  He had never been in Holst’s apartment. He had seen inside many of the others, since the tenants sometimes left their doors open. Some women did their washing in the halls, although it was forbidden by the landlord.

  Everywhere during the day reigned a painfully raw, almost frozen light, since the windows were high and wide, and the stairs and halls were painted white, so that the snow outside glared throughout the building.

  “Do you play the piano?” Lotte asked the new girl.

  “A little, madame.”

  “Well, then, play something for us.”

  Lotte had used the formal vous. Tonight she would begin to use the familiar tu, but she always started out with vous.

  Lotte was a reddish-gold blonde without a single gray hair; her face was still young. If she didn’t eat so much, if she hadn’t let herself go, she would still have been very beautiful. But she didn’t care about her figure. On the contrary, she seemed almost delighted to be getting fat. She probably left her dressing gown half open on purpose to reveal her large, very soft breasts, which trembled whenever she moved.

  “Your pants are ironed. Are you going out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He would have liked to sleep all day. That was impossible because the bedrooms had to be made up. Sometimes the bell would ring as early as noon. He never met his friends before five o’clock. Nobody he knew really got started until the end of the day, so for hours on end he would lie around doing nothing.

  Often, in a bathrobe, uncombed and unshaved, he would sit in the kitchen with his feet against the oven door, reading any book that happened to be lying around. If he wanted to, he would climb on the table when he heard voices in the bedroom.

  Today, almost unconsciously, he hung around the new girl playing the piano, and not too badly, either. But actually she wasn’t the one on his mind. His thoughts kept coming back to Holst and Sissy, and that annoyed him. He hated when ideas teased him like that, like a fly buzzing around in a storm.

  “Somebody rang the bell, Frank.”

  The piano had almost drowned out the sound. Lotte put away the ironing board and the iron, glanced around the room to see that everything was in order, and said to Minna, “Keep playing.”

  Then she opened the door a little. Recognizing the caller, she murmured, without enthusiasm, “Oh, it’s you, Monsieur Hamling. Come in. Minna, you can go.”

  And, holding her dressing gown closed with one hand, she pushed a chair forward for the visitor.

  “Sit down. Hadn’t you better take off your galoshes?”

  “I won’t stay long.”

  Minna had joined Frank in the kitchen. In the next room Bertha was making the bed. The new girl was nervous and uneasy.

  “Is it a client?”

  “It’s the chief inspector of police.”

  That frightened her even more. Frank remained calm and a little scornful.

  “You needn’t be scared. He’s a friend of my mother’s.”

  It was almost true. The inspector had known Lotte since she was a young girl. Had there been anything between them? Possibly. In any case he was now a man of fifty, well built but without any excess weight. He probably wasn’t married. If he was, he never mentioned a wife and didn’t wear a wedding ring.

  Everybody in the district was afraid of him, except Lotte.

  “You can come in, Frank.”

  “Hello, Inspector.”

  “Hello, young man.”

  “Frank, you might offer Monsieur Hamling a little drink. And I’ll take one, too, please.”

  The chief inspector’s visits were always the same. He really did seem to have dropped in like a neighbor or a friend. He accepted the chair he was offered and the little glass. He smoked his cigar, unbuttoned his black overcoat, and let out a tiny sigh of satisfaction, like a man delighted to be able to rest for a moment in a cozy atmosphere.

  He always seemed to be about to say something or to ask a question. The first few times, Lotte had been sure he was trying to find out what went on in her apartment.

  Even if they had been friends in the past, they had been out of touch for years. After all he was the chief inspector of police.

  “That’s very good,” he said, putting his glass down on a small table.

  “It’s the best you can get these days.”

  Then he fell silent. The silence never discomfited Hamling. Perhaps he did it on purpose because he knew that it disconcerted others, especially Lotte, who only stopped talking when her mouth was full.

  He looked calmly at the open piano with its absurdly homey air, at the two little tables with their manicure sets. He had caught a glimpse of Minna as she left the room to go into the kitchen, and must have known she was a new girl. He had heard the piano from the landing.

  What did he think? Nobody knew. They had often discussed it.

  He obviously knew about Lotte’s activities. Once he had come in the afternoon—that had never happened before— when a client was there, and there was no mistaking the sounds that reached the salon.

  Making some excuse about a stew on the stove, Lotte had gone to the kitchen and warned the man not to come out until she gave him the signal.

  That time, unexpectedly, Hamling had stayed for two hours for no reason, without any excuse, and with his usual air of paying a polite call.

  Did he know Minna? Had her parents been to the police?

  Lotte was all smiles. Frank, on the contrary, looked at him coldly and without trying to hide his disdain. Hamling’s features and body were hard—he was a man of granite—but the contrast with his eyes, glittering with irony, was striking.

  “Those fellows had some work to do in your street this morning.”

  Frank di
dn’t betray any emotion. His mother only barely kept from glancing at him, as though she sensed her son were somehow involved.

  “A fat noncommissioned officer was killed near the tannery. He lay all night in the snow. He had come from Timo’s.”

  All this was said as if casually. He picked up his drink again, warming it in the palms of his hands and sipping it slowly.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Lotte said.

  “There was no gunshot. It was done with a knife. They’ve already arrested someone.”

  Why did Frank immediately think, Holst!

  It was stupid. Even more stupid because the streetcar conductor had nothing to do with anything.

  “You might know him, Frank, a young man about your age who lives in the building with his mother. On the second floor, at the end of the hall on the left. He’s a violinist.”

  “I’ve sometimes seen a young man with a violin case.”

  “I forget his name. He insists he didn’t leave his apartment last night, and his mother, naturally, says the same thing. He says, too, that he’s never set foot in Timo’s. At any rate, it doesn’t matter to us. Those gentlemen are in charge of the investigation. All I’ve heard is that his violin was a sham, that most of the time the case is full of documents. Apparently he’s a member of a terrorist group.”

  Why did Frank wince? He lit another cigarette. “He seemed sick to me,” he said.

  It was true. Several times he had passed a tall, lanky young man on the stairs, always dressed in black, wearing a too-light overcoat and holding a violin case under his arm. He had red spots under his eyes and overly red lips, and he would often stop on the stairs to cough his lungs out.

  Hamling had said “terrorist,” like the occupiers. Others said “patriot.” But that meant nothing. Especially when it was an official talking. It was hard to guess what he was thinking.

  Did Hamling despise them, his mother and him? Not because of the girls—that was no concern of his. But because of everything else, their coal, their being in with so many people, and because of the officers who frequented the house.