Dirty Snow (3 page)

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?

W
HEN 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 rested 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.

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.