“‘Annemarie,’ Matthäi called.
“‘I’m coming,’ the girl replied, but she remained sitting where she was.
“Matthäi carefully climbed across the garbage and finally stood next to the child.
“‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
“‘Waiting.’
“‘For what?’
“‘For the wizard.’
“The girl had nothing but fairy tales in her head; one day she’d be waiting for an elf, the next it would be a wizard; it was like a mockery of his own waiting. Despair overcame him again, the realization of the futility of his actions, and the paralyzing knowledge that he had no choice but to go on waiting because there was nothing left for him to do but wait, wait, and wait.
“‘Come on,’ he said listlessly, took the child by the hand and walked back with her through the forest, sat down on the bench again, stared into space; twilight came, night; he had become indifferent to everything; he sat there, smoking, waiting and waiting, mechanically, with fixed determination, relentlessly. Once in a while he unconsciously whispered, as if to summon his enemy out of the night: ‘Come already, come, come, come.’ Then he sat motionless in the white moonlight, and suddenly fell asleep. He woke up stiff and frozen at dawn and crawled into bed.
“But the next morning, Annemarie came home from school earlier than usual. Matthäi had just risen from his bench to pick her up when she came walking along with her school bag on her back, singing quietly and hopping from one foot to another. The doll dangled from her hand, its little feet dragging on the ground.
“‘Homework?’ Matthäi asked.
“Annemarie shook her head and continued her song: ‘Maria sat upon a stone,’ and went into the house. He let her go; he was too desperate, too hopeless, too tired to tell new fairy tales, to entice her with new games.
“But when Lotte Heller came home, she asked: ‘Was Annemarie a good girl?’
“‘What do you mean? She was in school all day,’ Matthäi replied.
“Lotte looked at him with surprise: ‘In school? But she had the day off, teachers’ conference or something.’
“Matthäi sat up straight. The disappointment of the past few weeks was suddenly dispelled. He sensed that the fulfillment of his hopes, of his mad expectation, was near. He controlled himself with difficulty. He asked no more questions of Lotte Heller. Nor did he probe the little girl. But the next afternoon he drove to the village and left the car in a side street. He wanted to watch the girl secretly. It was almost four. From the windows came singing, then screams and shouts, the children poured out of the building, boys were fighting and throwing stones, girls were walking arm in arm; but Annemarie was not among them. The teacher came out and subjected Matthäi to a moment of stern, stiff scrutiny before informing him that Annemarie had not been in school. ‘Is she ill?’ she asked. ‘She was already absent day before yesterday, in the afternoon, and she brought no excuse.’ Matthäi replied that the child was indeed sick, said good-bye, and drove like a madman back to the woods. He rushed through the underbrush to the clearing, found nothing. Exhausted, breathing heavily, scratched and bleeding from the thorns, he returned to the car and drove home. But before he reached the gas station, he saw the girl skipping along the edge of the road. He stopped.
“‘Get in, Annemarie,’ he said pleasantly, after opening the door.
“Matthäi held out his hand to help the girl climb into the car. Then he noticed that her hand was sticky. And when he looked at his own hand, he saw traces of chocolate.
“‘Who gave you the chocolate?’ he asked.
“‘A girl,’ Annemarie replied.
“‘In school?’
“Annemarie nodded. Matthäi said nothing. He pulled up in front of the house. Annemarie climbed out and sat down on the bench in front of the gas station. Matthäi watched her unobtrusively. The child put something in her mouth and started chewing. Slowly he went up to her.
“‘Show me,’ he said, and carefully opened the slightly clenched little hand, revealing a prickly brown ball, partly bitten off. A chocolate truffle.
“‘Do you have any more?’ Matthäi asked.
“The girl shook her head.
“The inspector reached into the pocket of Annemarie’s skirt, pulled out her handkerchief, unfolded it, and found two more truffles in it.
“Annemarie was silent.
“Nor did the inspector speak. An enormous happiness had swept over him. He sat down on the bench next to the child.
“‘Annemarie,’ he finally asked, and his voice was quivering as he carefully held the prickly chocolate balls in his hand, ‘did the wizard give them to you?’
“The girl said nothing.
“‘Did he forbid you to tell anyone about you and him?’ he asked.
“No answer.
“‘You’re right not to tell,’ Matthäi said kindly. ‘He’s a nice wizard. You can go see him again tomorrow.’
“All at once the girl beamed as if in tremendous joy, embraced Matthäi, ardent with happiness, and ran up to her room.”
26
“The next morning at eight—I had just arrived at my office—Matthäi laid the chocolate truffles on my desk. He was so excited that he hardly greeted me. He was wearing his former suit, but without a tie, and he was unshaven. He took a cigar from the box I offered him and started puffing away.
“‘What’s this chocolate about?’ I asked, dumbfounded.
“‘The hedgehogs,’ Matthäi replied.
“I looked at him, still baffled, turning the little chocolate balls between my fingers. ‘What do you mean?’
“‘Very simple,’ he explained. ‘The murderer gave Gritli Moser chocolate truffles, and she turned them into hedgehogs. That’s the secret of her drawing.’
“I laughed: ‘How do you want to prove that?’
“‘Well, the same thing has happened to Annemarie,’ Matthäi replied, and gave me a complete report.
“I was instantly convinced. I summoned Henzi, Feller, and four policemen, gave them instructions, and informed the public prosecutor. Then we drove off. The gas station was abandoned. Lotte Heller had taken the child to school and gone on to the factory.
“‘Does her mother know what happened?’ I asked.
“Matthäi shook his head. ‘She has no idea.’
“We went to the clearing. We searched it carefully but found nothing. Then we split up. It was close to noon; Matthäi returned to the gas station in order not to arouse suspicion. It was a favorable day, a Thursday, when the child had no school in the afternoon. Gritli Moser had also been killed on a Thursday—the realization shot through me. It was a bright autumn day, hot, dry, dense with the humming of bees, wasps, and other insects, and with the screeching of birds. From far away, you could hear the echoing blows of an ax. At two o’clock, the bells of the village rang out sharply, and then the girl appeared, broke through the shrubs across from me, effortlessly hopping, jumping, ran to the little brook with her doll, sat down, and gazed steadily toward the woods, attentive, tense, with shining eyes. She seemed to be waiting for someone, but she couldn’t see us. We were hidden behind trees and shrubs. Then Matthäi cautiously came back and leaned against a treetrunk near me, as I was doing.
“‘I think he’ll be here within a half hour,’ he whispered.
“I nodded.
“Everything had been meticulously organized. We were keeping an eye on the access road from the highway to the woods. We even had wireless equipment. We were all armed with revolvers. The child was sitting by the brook, almost motionless, full of wondrous, anxious, marveling expectation, the garbage heap at her back. At times she was in the sun, then in the shadow of one of the great dark firs; not a sound could be heard other than the humming of the insects and the trilling of the birds. Now and then the girl sang to herself with her thin voice: ‘Maria sat upon a stone,’ over and over, always the same words and verses; and heaped around the stone on which she sat were rusty tin cans, met
al barrels, and wires; and sometimes abrupt gusts of wind came blowing across the clearing, rousing the leaves till they danced and rustled, until it was quiet again. We waited. Nothing was left of the world but this forest, enchanted by the colors of autumn, and the little girl with her red skirt in the clearing. We waited for the murderer, determined, avid for justice, retribution, punishment. The half hour had long since passed—two whole hours, in fact. We waited and waited; we ourselves now were waiting as Matthäi had waited for weeks and months. Five o’clock came; the first shadows, then the twilight, the dimming, the dulling of all the radiant colors. The girl skipped away. Not one of us said a word, not even Henzi.
“‘We’ll come back tomorrow,’ I decided. ‘We’ll spend the night in Chur. At the Hotel Steinbock.’
“And so we waited on Friday and Saturday also. I really ought to have used the Graubünden police. But this was our affair. I didn’t want to have explain anything, didn’t want any interference. The public prosecutor called on Thursday evening already, objected, protested, threatened, dismissed the whole thing as nonsense, flew into a rage, insisted we come back to Zurich. I remained firm, told him we would stay regardless of his objections, and compromised only to the degree of sending one officer back. We waited and waited. At this point we were no longer concerned about the child or the murderer; we were concerned with Matthäi. The man had to be proven right, had to reach his goal, otherwise there would be a disaster; we all felt it, even Henzi, who said he was convinced now. On Friday night he declared firmly that the unknown killer would be coming on Saturday; after all, he said, we had incontrovertible evidence—the hedgehogs—and besides, why would the girl keep coming back to sit in the same spot again and again? She had to be waiting for someone. And so we stood in our hiding places, behind our trees and shrubs, motionless, for hours, staring at the child, at the tin cans, at the tangles of wire, at the mountain of ashes, smoking in silence, never exchanging a word, listening to her perpetual singsong: ‘Maria sat upon a stone.’ On Sunday the situation was more difficult. The woods were suddenly full of hikers, on account of the long spell of sunny weather. Some sort of mixed chorus with a conductor broke into the clearing, noisy, sweating, shirtsleeved, took up formal positions, and burst into mighty praise of the joys of wandering and the eternal glory of God on high. Thank heaven we weren’t in uniform behind our shrubs. Later a couple came along and behaved rather shamelessly despite the presence of the child, who simply sat there, waiting with incomprehensible patience, in rapt anticipation, for the fourth afternoon in a row. We waited and waited. By now the three policemen had gone back with their wireless equipment. There were only four of us left: Henzi, Feller, Matthäi, and I. Strictly speaking our stakeout was no longer justifiable, but Henzi pointed out that Sunday wasn’t a safe day for the killer, so the day didn’t really count. He was right about that, so we waited on Monday, too. On Tuesday, Henzi went back to headquarters—somebody had to take care of business—but he was still convinced that we were on the verge of finding the murderer. We waited and waited and waited, constantly hiding, each of us independent of the others now, since we were too few to organize a cordon. Feller had posted himself near the forest path behind a bush, where he lay in the shadow, dozing in the summery heat of that placid autumn and suddenly snoring so intensely that the wind wafted the sounds across the clearing; this happened on Wednesday. Matthäi was standing on the side of the clearing nearest to the gas station, and I was watching the scene from the opposite side. And so we waited in ambush for the murderer, the hedgehog giant, with the child between us, and were startled each time a car passed on the main road. Every day the girl came to the clearing by the little brook, singing ‘Maria sat upon a stone,’ stubbornly, mindlessly. It was incomprehensible; we began to detest her, hate her. Sometimes, of course, she took a long time to come. She would wander about near the village with her doll, staying clear of the houses, since she was playing hooky. That caused us some problems. I had to talk to her teacher in private to prevent the school from looking into the matter. I cautiously hinted at our reason for being there, identified myself, and obtained her somewhat hesitant consent. Then the child circled the forest. We followed her with our binoculars, but she always returned to the clearing—except for Thursday, when, to our despair, she stayed near the gas station. Whether we wanted to or not, we had to hope for Friday. Now I had to make a decision; Matthäi had long since fallen silent, and was standing behind his tree the next day when the girl came skipping along again with her red dress and her doll and sat down as she had on previous days. The glorious fall weather was still strong, radiant, bursting with life before the long sleep of decay; but the public prosecutor couldn’t take another half hour of this. He came at five P.M., in the car with Henzi, showed up completely unexpectedly, came over to me, who had been standing there since one o’clock, constantly shifting from foot to foot, staring at that child, red in the face, I’m sure, with anger at that ceaseless little voice: ‘Maria sat upon a stone.’ I was so sick of that song, and sick of that child, too, that horrible little gap-toothed mouth, those skimpy braids, that shoddy little red dress; she looked disgusting to me, vulgar, idiotic—I could have strangled her, killed her, torn her limb from limb, just to shut her up and put an end to that awful song. It was maddening. Everything was still as it always had been, viciously stupid, senseless, except that the dry leaves were piling up higher and the gusts of wind were perhaps more frequent, and the sun was pouring more gold than ever onto that vile heap of garbage. It was simply unbearable. And then all of a sudden the public prosecutor started running—it was like a release, a liberation—broke through the undergrowth, straight toward the child, ignoring the fact that his shoes were sinking into the ashes, and as we saw him stomping up to the girl, we, too, burst out of our cover; it was time to put an end to this.
“‘Who are you waiting for?’ the public prosecutor screamed at the girl, who sat on her stone, clutching her doll and staring up at him in terror.
“‘Who are you waiting for, damn it, answer me now!’
“And now we had all reached the girl and surrounded her, and she stared at us in utter horror and incomprehension.
“‘Annemarie,’ I said, and my voice was quivering with rage, ‘a week ago someone gave you some chocolate. I’m sure you remember, little pieces of chocolate that looked like hedgehogs. Did a man in black clothes give them to you?’
“The girl did not answer. She just looked at me with tears in her eyes.
“Now Matthäi knelt down before her and put his arms around her little shoulders. ‘Look, Annemarie,’ he explained, ‘you must tell us who gave you the chocolate. You must tell us exactly what that man looked like. I once knew a girl,’ he continued urgently, for now everything was at stake, ‘a girl who wore a red dress just like yours, and a big man in black clothes gave her chocolate. The same spiky little chocolate balls you ate. And then the girl went to the woods with that big man, and the big man killed the girl with a knife.’
“He fell silent. The girl still did not reply. She stared at him with wide-open eyes.
“‘Annemarie,’ Matthäi screamed, ‘you must tell me the truth! All I want is to keep you from getting hurt!’
“‘You’re lying,’ the girl quietly replied. ‘You’re lying.’
“Now the public prosecutor lost his patience for the second time. ‘You stupid brat,’ he yelled, grabbing the child’s arm and shaking her, ‘now tell us what you know!’ And we all shouted with him, senselessly, because we had simply lost control of ourselves; we, too, shook her, and started to hit her, beat that little body lying there in ashes and red leaves among rusty tin cans, beat her cruelly, furiously, shouting and yelling.
“The girl let our fury pass over her for what seemed an eternity, though it must have lasted only a few seconds, and made no sound at all. But then suddenly she screamed with such an unearthly, inhuman voice that we stood frozen to the spot. ‘You’re lying! You’re lying! You’re lying!’ Appalled,
we let her go. Her screams had brought us back to our senses, and we were filled with horror and shame at what we had done.
The Pledge Page 9
