Dirty Snow (21 page)

“There you are! And that's nothing, I suppose?”

“It's money.”

“Money, yes. A lot of money.”

“I earned it.”

“You earned it, there you are! When you earn money, there's always someone, or some bank, that gives it to you. That is correct, isn't it? And all I want to know is who gave you the money. It's simple, it's easy. You only have to tell me the name. There you are!”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know who gave you the money?”

“I got it from different places.”

“Really?”

“I'm in business.”

“You don't say!”

“You get paid here and there. Bills change hands. You don't pay attention …”

But suddenly the man's tone changed, he shut the drawer with a bang before pronouncing categorically, “No!”

He looked furious, menacing. For a moment, as he came around the desk and again put his hand on his shoulder, Frank thought he was going to slap him. Instead he pulled him to his feet. All the while the officer was talking, almost as if to himself.

“It's just money from wherever, isn't it? You're paid here and there and you stuff it in your pockets without bothering to take a look.”

“Yes.”

“No!”

Frank's throat tightened. He didn't know what his inter-locutor was driving at. He felt a vague threat, a mystery. He had been racking his brains for eighteen, almost nineteen days. He had tried to foresee everything, and nothing was happening the way it should. All at once they confronted him with an entirely different situation. The school, the old gentleman with glasses, suddenly represented a world that was almost reassuring, and yet now he had a cigarette in his mouth, he could hear the clatter of typewriters in the next room, women walking down the corridor.

“Look carefully, Friedmaier, and tell me if it's still just money from somewhere or other.”

He had taken one of the bills from the desk. He led Frank toward the window with his hand on his shoulder and held the money against the light.

“Closer! Don't be afraid! You needn't be afraid.”

Why did those words seem more threatening than the sound of the blows he had heard the first day in the old gentleman's office?

“Look carefully. In the left-hand corner. Tiny little holes. Six little holes. There you are! And the little holes form a design. And there are little holes like these in all the bills that were found in your pocket as well as in the ones you spent.”

Frank was struck dumb and couldn't think. It was as if a chasm had unexpectedly opened up in front of him, as if the wall around the window had suddenly ceased to exist, leaving the two men on the edge of the void over the street.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know, do you?”

“No.”

“And you also didn't know the significance of these little holes? There you are! You don't know!”

It was true. He had never heard of such a thing. He had the impression that merely knowing the meaning of what the officer called the little holes would be a more crushing indictment against him than any crime. He wanted someone to look into his eyes and read his good faith in them, his absolute sincerity.

“I swear I don't know.”

“But I know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I do know, yes. And that's why I also have to know where you got those bills.”

“I told you …”

“No!”

“I swear to you …”

“Those bills were stolen.”

“Not by me.”

“No!”

How could he be so sure? And then he said, articulating and emphasizing each syllable: “They were stolen from
here
.”

As Frank looked around the room in terror, the officer corrected himself. “They were stolen here,
from this building
.”

Frank was afraid he was going to faint. From then on he understood the meaning of the phrase “cold sweat.” He understood other things. Everything, it seemed.

The little holes in the bills were made by the Occupation authorities. Which bills? Of what issue?

No one knew, no one even suspected, and it was terrifying just to be in on the secret.

Damn it, they weren't accusing him! And not Kromer, either. They knew very well that they were only petty crooks and that people like them didn't have access to certain safes.

Did they already suspect the general? Had they arrested Kromer? Had they questioned him? Had he talked?

Frank had been groping in the dark for eighteen and a half days. Everything had been false, stupid. He had been concentrating on unimportant people, people like himself, as though destiny had any use for them.

Destiny had chosen a banknote, probably one he had spent at Timo's, or at the tailor's where he had bought his camel-hair coat. Perhaps one of the bills he had given to Kropetzki for his sister's eyes.

“We have to know, you see?” said the officer, sitting down.

Once again he pushed the box of cigarettes toward Frank.

“There you are, Friedmaier. There you have the whole business.”

H
E WAS
lying on his stomach, asleep. He was conscious of being asleep. It was something he'd learned recently, along with a lot of other things. Before, it had been only toward morning, especially when the sun was coming up, that he had been conscious of being asleep. And since the feeling was stronger after getting drunk the night before, he often came home after drinking simply to relish that conscious sleep.

Still, it hadn't been quite the same as this new sleep. Before, he never slept flat on his stomach. Did all prisoners learn to sleep flat on their stomachs? He had no idea. He didn't care. And yet, if he'd had the patience and will to study it, he would have gladly used their complicated system of communication just to let them all know: “Sleep flat on your stomachs!”

But it wasn't just sleeping flat on your stomach. It was crushing yourself, like an animal, like a bug, onto the boards that he had for bedsprings. Hard as they were, he felt like he was leaving the imprint of his body on them, as if he was sleeping on a field of soft earth.

He was lying flat on his stomach, and it hurt. Lots of little bones and muscles hurt, not all at once, not all together, but in a regular sequence that he was beginning to recognize, and that he had learned to orchestrate like a symphony. There were deep, dark pains and there were much sharper ones, so sharp that you saw everything in pale yellow light. Some lasted only a few seconds, but were so voluptuous in their intensity that you regretted it when they were over; others formed a background, mingling and harmonizing so completely that it was impossible to tell where each pain came from.

His face was buried in his jacket, which he had rolled into a ball to make a pillow—a jacket, he was sorry to say, that had been almost new when he arrived. And he had been stupid, at first, to be so careful with it, to take it off at night, so that now it didn't smell as good as it might.

To get a good whiff of himself—to breathe in that smell of earth, of being alive, of sweat. Deliberately he sank his nose in where it stank most, under the arms. He wanted to stink, as people said outside, to stink as the earth stinks, because outside people think that men stink, that the earth stinks.

To feel his heart beat, everywhere, in his temples, his wrists, his big toes. To smell the smell of his breath, the warmth of it. To mix up the images in his mind, larger, bigger than life, things seen, heard, and lived, and others, too, that might have happened, to mix them all together, his eyes closed, his body still, while he listened for a certain footstep on the iron stairs.

He had gotten good at this game. But why call it a game? It was life. At school they had said, “He's good at math.” Not him, but a schoolmate with an enormous head.

And now Frank was good at life. He knew how to sink into the boards, bury his face in his jacket, shut his eyes, sink in, throw ballast overboard, sink down and surface again at will, or almost. Somewhere there were still days, hours, minutes. Not here, not for him. Since arriving, when he really wanted to keep track of time, he counted it in so many “dives.”

It sounded stupid. But he wasn't getting stupid. He hadn't lost his grip, and he was more determined than ever not to let himself go. Instead, he made progress. What was the use of bothering about hours, outside hours, in a building where nothing depended on them?

If you had a sweet tooth, and you cut a cake in quarters, you'd keep an eye on the quarters. But what if you cut slices? What if you sliced the cake to bits?

Everything had to be learned, starting with sleep. To think that people believed they knew how to sleep! They all had too many hours to devote to it if they wanted. People complained about being slaves to alarm clocks, yet they set them themselves when they went to bed, they even checked, half asleep, to make sure it was on.

To wake up to an alarm clock you set yourself! To wake yourself up, in other words! They called that slavery!

Let them learn to sleep on their stomachs first, sleep anywhere, on the ground like worms, like bugs. And if they couldn't have the smell of the earth, let them be satisfied to stink.

Lotte sprayed perfume under her arms and probably between her legs. She made her girls do the same.

It was unthinkable!

To sleep flat on your stomach, to measure out, to be in wait for, to orchestrate your aches, to feel with your tongue the hole where two teeth were missing, to tell yourself that if everything went well, if it was a lucky day, you'd see the window beyond the courtyard, way over there, to sleep like that, to think like that—this was already getting closer to the truth. It wasn't the whole truth yet, he knew that very well. But it was a comfort to know you were on the right track.

There was a signal that meant that the others in the next classroom were going for recess. What else could he call it? Their steps were joyous. Whatever they said, their steps were joyous, even the ones who were going to be shot the very next day, maybe because they didn't know it yet.

They'd gone by. Very well! Now the question was whether the old gentleman had enough work or not. The old gentleman was more important than anyone else in the world. He wasn't married. Or if he was, his wife must have stayed in his country, which came to the same thing. Busy or not, all he had to do was raise his head and order, “Bring me Frank Friedmaier.”

Luckily, he rarely summoned him at this hour. It was even luckier that no one knew—that was one of the reasons Frank slept on his stomach. Because if they knew what it was he was waiting for, if they suspected even for a moment how much joy it gave him, they would have been sure to change the school's whole schedule.

It was no longer winter. Well, not exactly. It was still, obviously, midwinter, with the worst of the cold yet to come. Generally it came in February or March, and the later it came the worse it was, sometimes lasting to the middle, even the end of April.

Let's say the darkest part of the tunnel was past. This year there was a false spring, not unusual at the end of January. At least, outside they called it a false spring. The air and the sky were limpid. The snow shone without melting, and yet it wasn't cold. The water was frozen every morning, and all day the sun was so bright that you would have sworn the birds were going to start building their nests. They must have been fooled, too, since you could see them flying around in pairs, chasing each other in a mating dance.

The window over there, beyond the gym or assembly hall, stayed open longer. One time he could make out from the woman's movements that she was ironing. And there had been another time that was wonderful, and completely unexpected. Probably because she was taking advantage of the warmer weather to do her spring-cleaning, the window had stayed open for more than two hours! Had she put the cradle in another room or covered the sleeping baby with extra blankets? She had shaken clothes out at the open window—some men's clothes, too. She had shaken them out and beaten them like rugs, and each of her movements not only hurt Frank horribly but did him good.

From that distance, she was no bigger than a doll. He wouldn't recognize her in the street—it didn't matter, that would never happen. She was just a doll. He couldn't make out her features. But it was a woman, and she was looking after her home. And he could sense her enthusiasm. He could feel it.

He watched for her every morning. Logically, at that hour, he should have been collapsed with exhaustion. At first he was afraid of missing her. It had happened only once, when he had been at the end of his rope. That was before he had learned how to orchestrate his sleep.

She didn't know. She would never know. It was a woman, not a rich one, a poor woman to judge by where she lived. She had a husband and a child. The man probably went to work early, since Frank never saw him. Did she put his lunch in a tin lunch box like the one Holst took with him on his streetcar? Maybe. Probably. As soon as he left she began to work in her home, their home. She must sing with the baby and laugh with it a lot. Babies don't cry all the time—as his wet-nurse had tried to make him believe.

“When you used to cry …”

“The day you cried so hard …”

“The Sunday when you were so insufferable …”

She never said, “When you used to laugh …”

And the bed, the bed that smelled of the
two of them
. She didn't know. If she'd known, she wouldn't have hung the sheets and blankets to air in the window. She wouldn't even have opened the window. It was lucky for him that she was from the outside. In her place, he'd have shut everything, kept everything for himself. He wouldn't have allowed anything of their life to escape.

The spring-cleaning morning had seemed so extraordinary to him that he couldn't believe fate had reserved such joys for him. There she was celebrating the false spring in her own way, airing, cleaning, polishing. She shook everything, shifted everything. She was beautiful!