“‘We’re animals,’ I gasped. ‘We’re beasts.’
“The child ran across the clearing to the edge of the forest. ‘You’re lying! You’re lying! You’re lying!’ she shrieked again, so horribly we thought she had lost her mind, but she ran straight into the arms of her mother. For Lotte Heller—as if things hadn’t gone from bad to worse already—had just at that moment stepped into the clearing. That was all we needed. She was informed about everything; the teacher had talked after all when Lotte walked past the school; I knew it, I didn’t have to ask. And now this creature of doom stood there, hugging her sobbing child, and staring at us with the same look her daughter had given us before. Naturally she knew every one of us—Feller, Henzi, and unfortunately the public prosecutor, too; the situation was grotesquely awkward; we were all embarrassed and felt plainly ridiculous; the whole thing was nothing but a lousy miserable comedy. ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’ the child was still screaming, beside herself. ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’ Then Matthäi went up to the two of them, head bowed, with uncertain steps.
“‘Fräulein Heller,’ he said politely, humbly in fact, which made no sense at all, because there was only one thing left to do, and that was to put an end to the whole thing, finish, case closed, cut loose from the whole bloody puzzle, no matter whether the murderer existed or not. ‘Fräulein Heller, I noticed that Annemarie was given chocolate by an unknown person. I have reason to suspect that this is the same person who lured a little girl into a forest a few weeks ago and killed her.’
“He spoke precisely and in such an officious manner I could have laughed out loud. The woman calmly looked into his eyes. Then she spoke just as formally and politely as Matthäi. ‘Inspector,’ she asked softly, ‘did you take me and Annemarie into your gas station just so you could find this person?’
“‘There was no other way, Fräulein Heller,’ the inspector replied.
“‘You are a swine,’ the woman quietly replied, without moving a muscle in her face. Then she took her child and went through the woods in the direction of the gas station.”
27
“We stood there in the clearing, in the lengthening shadows, surrounded by old tin cans and tangled wire, our feet in ashes and leaves. It was all over, our whole undertaking had turned into a senseless, ridiculous mess, in fact nothing less than a catastrophe. Matthäi was the only one who had regained his composure. He looked downright stiff and dignified in his blue mechanic’s outfit. He performed a tight little bow before the public prosecutor—I could hardly believe my eyes and ears—and said: ‘Herr Burkhard, now we must keep on waiting. There is no other way. We must wait, wait, and wait again. If you would give me six more men and the radio equipment, that would be enough.’
“The public prosecutor eyed my former subordinate with alarm. He had come prepared for everything but this. Just a moment ago he had firmly intended to give us all an earful; now he gulped a few times, passed a hand over his forehead, and then abruptly turned on his heels and stomped with Henzi through the woods in the direction of the gas station. At a sign from me, Feller also left.
“Matthäi and I were alone.
“‘Now you listen to me,’ I shouted, determined to bring the man to his senses at last, and furious at myself for supporting his nonsense, indeed for making it possible.
“‘The operation has failed, we have to admit that. We waited more than a week and no one showed up.’
“Matthäi did not answer. He just looked about, peering, listening. Then he went to the edge of forest, walked around the clearing, and returned. I was still standing on the garbage heap, up to my ankles in ashes.
“‘The girl was waiting for him,’ he said.
“I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The girl came here to be by herself, to sit by the brook, to dream with her doll, and to sing ‘Maria sat upon a stone.’ We just imagined that she was waiting for someone.’
“Matthäi listened attentively to my words.
“‘Someone gave Annemarie the hedgehogs,’ he said stubbornly, still firmly convinced.
“‘Someone gave Annemarie some chocolate,’ I said. ‘That’s true. Anyone could give chocolate to a child! But that those chocolate truffles were the hedgehogs in Gritli Moser’s drawing—I’m sorry, Matthäi, that, too, is your interpretation, and there’s nothing to prove it.’
“Again Matthäi gave no response. He walked back to the edge of the forest, circled the clearing again, searched a spot where fallen leaves had accumulated, then gave up and returned to me.
“‘This is the site for a murder,’ he said. ‘You can feel it. I will keep waiting.’
“‘But that’s nonsense,’ I replied, suddenly filled with horror and disgust. I was shivering, exhausted.
“‘He will come here,’ Matthäi said.
“I screamed at him, beside myself: ‘This is complete nonsense! It’s idiotic!’
“He seemed not to be listening. ‘Let’s go back to the gas station,’ he said.
“I was more than glad to turn my back on that accursed place. The sun stood low now, the shadows were tremendous, the wide valley lay steeped in a strong golden glow, and the sky above was a pure blue; but I hated everything. I felt as though I had been exiled to some huge, awful postcard world. Then the highway appeared—rolling cars, convertibles with colorfully dressed people, the wealth of life surging and roaring past. It was absurd. We reached the gas station. Feller was waiting in my car next to the pumps. He was half-asleep again. Annemarie was sitting on her swing, singing in a tinny, somewhat tearful voice, ‘Maria sat upon a stone,’ and there was a fellow standing there, leaning against the doorpost, probably a worker from the brickyard, with an open shirt and a hairy chest, a cigarette in his mouth, grinning. Matthäi ignored him. He went into the little room, to the table where we had sat before; I trotted after him. He put a bottle of schnapps on the table and poured himself one glass after the other. I couldn’t drink, I was too disgusted by everything. Lotte Heller was nowhere in sight.
“‘It’ll be hard,’ he said, ‘but the clearing isn’t that far. Or do you think I’d better wait here, by the gas station?’
“I didn’t answer him. Matthäi walked back and forth, drank, and ignored my silence.
“‘It’s too bad Annemarie and her mother found out,’ he said. ‘But we’ll fix that.’
“Outside, the noise of the road and the child’s whining voice: ‘Maria sat upon a stone.’
“‘I’m leaving now, Matthäi,’ I said.
“He went on drinking, didn’t even look at me.
“‘Good-bye,’ I said, left the room, stepped outside, walked past the man and the little girl, and waved to Feller, startling him out of his half sleep. He opened the door of the car for me.
“‘Back to headquarters,’ I ordered.”
28
“That’s the story as far as poor old Matthäi figures in it,” the former chief of the cantonal police continued. (This is probably the right place to mention the fact that the old man and I had long since finished our drive from Chur to Zurich and were now sitting in the Kronenhalle, the restaurant he had mentioned and praised so often in his account, being served by Emma, of course, under the painting by Gubler—which had replaced the Miró—all in accord with the old man’s habits and preference. I should mention, too, that we had already eaten—off the trolley, bollito milanese; this, too, was one of his traditions, why not go along with it; it was nearly four o’clock already, and after the “Café Partagas,” as the chief called his passion for smoking a Havana along with his espresso and following these up with a Réserve du Patron, he offered me a second charlotte. I should also add, as a purely technical point, in defense of my craft and for the sake of literary honesty, that I have of course not always reproduced that immense verbal outpouring precisely as it was delivered, and I’m not just referring to the fact that we spoke in Swiss dialect; I mean those parts of the old man’s story which he did not relate from his own point of view, as his own experience, but d
escribed objectively, as events in themselves—for example the scene when Matthäi gave his solemn promise. At such moments I had to intervene, shape and reshape, though I took the greatest pains not to falsify anything but only to take the material the old man supplied and rework it according to certain laws of the writer’s craft; in short, to put it into publishable form.)
“Naturally,” he continued, “I went back to visit Matthäi a few times, more and more convinced he had been mistaken about the peddler’s innocence, because in the following months, and eventually years, no new murder took place. Well, I don’t have to go into further detail; the man fell apart, drank himself into a perpetual stupor, degenerated; there was no way to help him or bring about a change; at night, the young fellows no longer slinked and whistled around the gas station in vain; things took a nasty turn, the Graubünden police made a number of raids. I had to fill them in on the whole story; once my colleagues in Chur understood, they looked the other way. They’ve always been more sensible up there than we are. So everything took its fatal course, and you saw the results yourself a few hours ago. It’s a sad story. Especially because the little girl, Annemarie, didn’t turn out any better than her mother. Possibly just because various organizations immediately leaped to her aid—foster homes and the like. She was taken care of, but kept running away and coming back to the gas station, where Lotte Heller set up that shabby bar two years ago. God only knows how she wangled the license; at any rate, that finished the kid. She pitched in. In every respect. Four months ago she came back after a year of reform school. Not that she learned anything from it. You saw her with your own eyes, let’s not dwell on it. But I bet you’ve been wondering all this time what my story has to do with the criticism I made of your lecture, and why I called Matthäi a genius. A very reasonable question. Your objection is probably that a wild and ingenious hunch isn’t necessarily right, let alone inspired. That, too, is correct. I can even imagine what you’re cooking up in your literary brain. All we need—I can imagine you making some sly calculation like this—all we need is for Matthäi to be on the right track, let him capture the murderer in the end, and bingo, we’ve got a terrific novel or movie script. After all, what’s the purpose of writing if not to give things a certain twist that’ll make them transparent, so that the higher idea shines through just enough for the reader to sense it, infer it; in fact, by this little twist, by making Matthäi succeed, my degenerate detective would become not just interesting, he’d be a character of biblical dimensions, a sort of modern Abraham of hope and faith, and my senseless story—of someone who goes after a nonexistent murderer because he believes in the innocence of a guilty man—would be full of meaning; thus the guilty peddler would become innocent in the realm of poetic vision, the nonexistent murderer would become a real one, and a course of events that tends to make a mockery of human faith and human reason would instead glorify these powers. Who cares what actually happened, and how; the main thing is that this version is equally possible. That, more or less, is how I imagine your train of thought, and I can predict that this variant of my story is so uplifting and positive that it will just have to be published or turned into a film in the near future. You will tell it all pretty much the way I tried to, but you’ll make it more understandable. After, all, you’re a pro. You won’t let the murderer show up until the very end; that way, hope is rewarded, faith triumphs, and the story becomes acceptable for the Christian world. I could imagine a few other softening touches. For example, I would suggest that as soon as Matthäi discovers the truffles, he is shocked into awareness of Annemarie’s dangerous situation and is no longer able to continue with his plan of using the child as bait—either out of mature altruism or out of paternal love, whereupon he could take Annemarie and her mother out of harm’s way and put a big doll next to the little brook. Then a huge, solemn figure would come striding out of the forest, straight up to the look-alike doll—Annemarie’s wizard, lusting for this new chance to apply his razor; then, realizing he had fallen into a diabolic trap, he would fly into a rage, a fit of madness, there’d be a fight with Matthäi and the police, and then perhaps at the end—please bear with me, I’m just trying to imagine—there’d be a deeply moving conversation between the wounded inspector and the child, not long, just a few fragmentary sentences. Why not? You could have the girl slip away from her mother to meet her beloved wizard, race through the woods toward her great happiness; that way, after all those horrors, you could pierce the darkness with a ray of gentle humanity, sweet renunciation, and poetic tenderness; or else, more likely, you’ll fabricate something very different; I know you a little by now, even though, to be perfectly frank, I prefer Max Frisch; it’ll be the very senselessness of my story that appeals to you, the fact that someone believes in the innocence of a guilty man and now sets out to find a murderer who cannot exist, as we have defined the situation accurately enough. But now you become cruder than reality; just for the hell of it and to make us policemen look completely ridiculous: now Matthäi would actually find a murderer, one of your comical saints, some sectarian preacher with a heart of gold who is, of course, innocent and utterly incapable of doing anything evil, and just for that reason, by one of your more malicious inventions, he would attract every shred of suspicion the plot has to offer. Matthäi would kill this pure, simple soul, all his proofs would be confirmed, whereupon we at headquarters would take the happy detective back into our fold and celebrate him as a genius. That’s another conceivable version. You see, I’m onto you. But I expect you won’t just ascribe all my talk to the Réserve du Patron—though we’re into our second bottle, admittedly; no, I presume you have a feeling that I have yet to tell the end of the story; with some reluctance, I must say, because unfortunately—I don’t have to hide this from you—unfortunately this story has a point, and as you no doubt already suspect, that point is a thoroughly shabby one, so shabby that it simply can’t be used in any decent novel or film. It is so ridiculous, stupid, and trivial, it would ruin the story, you would just have to skip it. However, it would be dishonest not to admit that this point is, for now at least, thoroughly in Mattäi’s favor, puts him in the proper light, and makes him a genius, a person so deeply attuned to aspects of reality that are hidden from us that he broke through the hypotheses and assumptions that obstruct our vision and penetrated close to those laws that keep the world in motion, and which always elude our grasp. He came close, but no nearer than that. For this gruesome point which, I’m very sorry to say, is a real part of my story—this factor of the incalculable, this randomness, if you will—makes all his genius, his plans, and his actions appear even more painfully absurd in hindsight than was the case before, when in the opinion of all of us at headquarters he was mistaken: there is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic. But when something like that happens, everything depends on the stance the genius takes toward the ridiculous thing that tripped him; whether he can accept it or not. Matthäi couldn’t accept it. He wanted reality to conform to his calculations. Therefore he had to deny reality and end in a void. So my story ends on a particularly sad note—it’s just about the most banal of all the possible ‘solutions.’ Sometimes that just happens. Sometimes the worst possible thing does take place. We are men, we have to reckon with that, armor ourselves against it, and above all, we have to realize that the only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, which is bound to manifest itself more and more forcefully and clearly, and the only way to make a reasonably comfortable home for ourselves on this earth, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations. Our rational mind casts only a feeble light on the world. In the twilight of its borders live the ghosts of paradox. Let us beware of taking these figments as things existing ‘in themselves,’ independently of the human mind; or, even worse: let us not make the mistake of regarding them as an error that can be avoided, which could tempt us to execute the world out of some sort of defiant morality once we made the attempt to establish a flawless rational structure, for it
s very perfection would be its deadly lie and a sign of the most terrible blindness. But forgive me for injecting this commentary into my lovely story. Philosophically not quite up to par, I know, but you have to grant an old man like me a few thoughts about what he’s experienced, crude though they may be; I’m just a policeman, but still I do make an effort to be a man and not an ox.”
29
“Well, it was last year—on a Sunday again, naturally—that I received a telephone call from a Catholic priest and had to pay a visit to the cantonal hospital. It happened just before my retirement, in the last days of my term in office. My successor was already on the job—not Henzi, who fortunately didn’t make it, despite his well-connected wife—but a man of substance and rigor, endowed with a civil decency that could only be of benefit to the office he held. The telephone call had reached me in my apartment. The only reason I acceded to the request was that it was supposed to be something important a dying woman wanted to tell me, which is something that happens now and then. It was a sunny but cold December day. Everything bare, forlorn, melancholy. At such moments our city can reduce you to tears. What a day! As if visiting a dying woman wasn’t depressing enough. That’s why I walked around Aeschbacher’s Harp in the park several times, in a rather gloomy mood, but finally I pulled myself together and walked into the building. Frau Schrott, medical clinic, private ward. The room, with a view to the park, was full of flowers, roses, gladioli. The curtains were half-drawn. Slanting rays of light fell on the floor. By the window sat a huge priest with a rough red face and a gray untended beard, and in the bed lay a little old woman, delicately wrinkled, her hair thin and snow white, extraordinarily gentle, apparently very rich, to judge by the care she was receiving. Next to the bed stood a complicated apparatus, some sort of medical contraption with various hoses that led under her blanket. The machine had to be repeatedly checked by a nurse who kept walking in and out of the room, silent and observant. I might as well mention these regular interruptions right at the start.
The Pledge Page 10
