Lotte regretted the fallout even more. Though men were never very enthusiastic about Bertha, she still managed to get them off, and besides, the good thing about her was that she did practically all the housework.
Minna would begin doing that now, but she wasn’t strong and her insides still hurt. As for Anny, the most you could hope for from her was that she’d make her bed in the morning.
And then there was the shopping, the standing in line, where you inevitably found yourself rubbing elbows with people from the neighborhood, sometimes other tenants in the building.
“You shouldn’t have slapped her … Anyway, it’s all over now.”
She noticed how pale her son was, the dark circles under his eyes. Frank had never drunk so much. And he had never gone out as often without saying where he was going, his eyes hard, and always with his loaded pistol in his pocket.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to walk around with that on you?”
He didn’t bother answering or even shrugging his shoulders. He had acquired a new habit that quickly became automatic: he would look at people talking to him as though he didn’t see them and hadn’t heard a thing.
Not once had he met Holst on the stairs, though he went up and down them five or six times a day, much more than usual. Holst had probably asked the streetcar company for time off in order to nurse his daughter. Frank felt sure that Holst would have to go out, if only to buy medicines and food. But other arrangements had been made. First thing every morning, Monsieur Wimmer knocked on his neighbor’s door. He did all the errands. Once, when the door had been left open, Frank caught sight of him in a woman’s apron, doing the housework.
The doctor came at around two o’clock every day. Frank contrived to run into him. He was quite a young man, and he looked like an athlete. He didn’t seem worried. True, it wasn’t his daughter or wife. Could Holst be ill, too? That had occurred to Frank. Then Wednesday, just as he was getting into the streetcar, he happened to glance up at the window and saw him there through the curtains. Their eyes had met across the distance, Frank was sure of it. Nothing would come of it, of course, but Frank was completely shaken by that moment of contact. They remained calm and serious, both of them, without hatred, the only thing between them was something akin to a great void.
His mother would be even more anxious if she knew that every day, sometimes twice a day, he made a point of going to the little café near the streetcar stop, the one where you had to go down two steps. It was practically a provocation, since there was no reason to go. The regulars always stopped talking when he came in and immediately looked away. The owner, Monsieur Kamp, who usually sat with them—they played cards—would get up to serve him with obvious reluctance.
Monday, Frank paid for his drink with a very large bill pulled from his roll.
“I’m sorry,” said Monsieur Kamp, handing it back, “I can’t make change for this.”
When he left, Frank put the bill on the bar saying casually, “Keep it.”
On Tuesday he could have sworn the regulars were waiting for him, and he felt something like a cold shiver. It wasn’t the first time. One fine day something was bound to happen, exactly when or what he couldn’t tell. It could just as well be in this quiet, old-fashioned café. Why had the customers looked at Monsieur Kamp expectantly, with barely concealed smiles?
Monsieur Kamp served Frank without a word. Then, when he was about to pay, Kamp took an envelope that was lying in plain sight on the shelf, between two bottles, and held it out.
Frank could feel the notes and coins. It was change from the big bill he’d left the day before.
He said thank you and left. It didn’t stop him from going back.
He almost had a fight with Timo. It was two o’clock in the morning. He had been drinking. He saw, sitting with a woman in a corner of the room, a man whose face he didn’t like. Frank, who was standing at the bar, showed Timo his gun and said, “When that guy leaves, I’m going to take him down!”
Timo looked at him stonily, without a hint of friendliness. “You’re crazy, right?”
“I’m not crazy. I don’t like his face and I’m going to take him down.”
“You’d better watch it or I’ll take you down with my fist.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I don’t like the way you’re acting lately. Go have your fun somewhere else if you want, not here. If you touch that guy I’ll have you arrested immediately—that’s number one. And from now on you’ll leave your little toy somewhere else; if you don’t, you won’t set foot in here again—that’s number two. And now I’ll give you some advice. Don’t drink so much. It makes you cocky, and at your age that won’t do.”
But Timo came over a little later to apologize. This time he talked in earnest.
“I laid it on a bit heavy just now, but it’s for your own good. Even your friend Kromer says you’re getting dangerous. I don’t want to know anything about what you do. But for some time now you’ve been acting like you think you’re a big shot. You think it’s smart to flash your roll of bills at anybody who comes along? You think people don’t know how that kind of money is made?”
Frank showed him his green card. Timo didn’t seem impressed. Embarrassed, rather. He made him put it back in his pocket.
“That, too, it’s better not to wave it around too much.”
He returned to the attack a third time. Conversations with Timo took place in snatches, since customers were always calling him from every direction.
“Listen here, my friend. I know you’ll think it’s envy on my part, but I’m just telling you the way it is. I’m not saying that card’s not valuable. Only there’s a right way to use it. And then things get more complicated …”
He wasn’t anxious to explain.
“Like what?”
“What’s the use talking about it? People always end up saying too much. I’m in fine with them. They leave me alone. Some of them bring me merchandise and they’ve always been straight with me, business-wise. Maybe it’s because I see a lot of them, all kinds, but there are other things I can figure out.”
“What?”
“I’ll give you an example. About a month ago, over there, at that third table, there was an officer, a colonel, a good-looking guy, still young, in good shape, medals all over his chest. He was with two women, and I don’t know what he was telling them—I was busy somewhere else. Anyway they were laughing loudly. And at one point he took his wallet out of his pocket, I guess to pay the check. The women grabbed it and began having fun with it. They were all drunk, the three of them. The women kept passing his papers and photographs back and forth. I was at the bar. And just then I saw a guy get up, someone I hadn’t even noticed, just an ordinary-looking guy, a civilian, like anybody you’d see in the street. He wasn’t even well dressed. He went over to the table and the colonel looked at him sort of startled, but still trying to smile. The other man said just one word, and I tell you, that officer got right up and stood at attention. He took his wallet from the women. He paid his check. You could see the starch go right out of him. He left the women there, without a word of explanation, and went out with the civilian.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” Frank mumbled.
“The next day he was seen at the station, headed for an unknown destination. That’s what I mean. Some of them seem powerful, and maybe for the moment they are. But they’re never—and don’t forget it—as powerful as they pretend, because no matter how powerful they are, there are always others who are more powerful still. And they’re the ones you never hear about.
“You work with one department where everybody shakes hands with you and you think you’re safe. Only, at the same moment, in another department, there’s a paper being drawn up with your name on it.
“If you want to know what I think, well, they have several sections. And no matter how good you’re in with one, you shouldn’t mess with another one.”
Frank remembered that the next m
orning, and it bothered him, all the more because he had a hangover. It was getting to be a habit. Every morning he promised himself to be more careful, but then he’d start drinking again because he needed to calm himself.
What struck him was the connection in his mind between Timo’s talk and something Lotte had said that he hadn’t paid any attention to at the time.
“You can feel that Christmas is coming. The faces are beginning to change.”
That meant her clientele was changing, at least as far as the occupiers were concerned. For her it was always an unpleasant period, since it kept her in a constant state of uneasiness. Every three months, or every six months—it usually happened around the big holidays, but that was probably a coincidence—there were personnel changes, both civil and military. Some went back to their country, others arrived who had different ways and whose characters were still an unknown quantity. Everything had to start all over again. Whenever a new client rang, Lotte believed she had to put on the manicure act again, and she never relaxed until the man pronounced the name of the friend who had sent him.
Without knowing exactly why, Frank didn’t want his general to leave. He called him his general, but he didn’t know him, in fact had never seen him. It was Kromer who knew him. His passion for watches had something innocent and reassuring about it. Frank was like his mother. He felt more comfortable with people who had a passion. For example, when you knew about Otto’s vices, you couldn’t be afraid of him. He was someone Frank could probably make use of one day. Otto would pay a good deal to avoid having certain of his peculiarities made known.
The sun had come out and there was a fine frost in the air. The last snowfall hadn’t had time to get dirty yet, and in certain areas gangs of unemployed men hired by the city were still busy shoveling the snow into dazzling piles on either side of the walkways.
He had the impression Kromer was avoiding him. True, he was also avoiding Kromer. So what was worrying him? And why say he was worried when he was perfectly calm, when it was he, of his own free will and in full awareness, who was doing everything to bring about his own destruction?
Going to Kamp’s, for example. There were surely, among the customers of the little café, people from the underground and the patriots’ leagues. There must be some, too, in the lines he passed every day, and he knew that his clothes and his shoes alone constituted a provocation.
Twice he had run into Carl Adler, the driver of the little truck that had taken him to the village the night of the Mademoiselle Vilmos business. It was odd: twice in four days, and both times by chance in unexpected places—the first time on the sidewalk opposite the Lido, the other time in a tobacco shop in the Upper Town.
Yet he had never met him before. Or rather, since he didn’t know him then, he might have brushed by him a hundred times without noticing.
That’s how ideas get into your head.
Was it on purpose, out of caution or a sort of decency, that Adler pretended not to recognize him?
But that didn’t matter. Even if it did, if there was treachery behind it, Frank would be delighted. One little detail, however, troubled him. Adler hadn’t been alone across from the theater. He had been with a man who lived in their building.
It was someone he had only caught a glimpse of on the stairs. Frank knew he lived on the third floor to the left and had a wife and a little girl. He must have been twenty-eight or thirty. He was thin and unhealthy looking, with a beard that was too blond and too sparse. He didn’t work in a factory. In an office, perhaps? No, not that, since Frank ran into him at all hours, and he didn’t look like a traveling salesman.
He was probably a technician like Adler, and in that case it was only natural that they should know each other.
One never knew who belonged to the underground or to a patriots’ league. They were often the most inoffensive-looking people, and the young blond man, with the wife and little girl, on the third floor was just the kind of tenant you never noticed.
Why should those people want to eliminate him? He hadn’t done anything to them. Mostly they killed their own members who betrayed them, and Frank couldn’t possibly do that, since he didn’t know them. That they despised him he was certain. But, like his mother, he had much more to fear from the animosity of their neighbors, which was based on envy and was only a matter of coal, warm clothes, and food.
And Lotte, too, only worried about the neighborhood. Since the authorities had left him alone so far about the Mademoiselle Vilmos affair, she realized he would never be asked about it. Even Kurt Hamling’s attitude, the little remarks he had let fall, implied nothing more than a local danger. Otherwise there would have been no sense in advising Frank to go to the country for a few days or to friends somewhere else in town.
He hadn’t succeeded in meeting Holst, as he would have liked, but they had seen each other at a distance. Holst, who must be as familiar with his footstep as Frank was with his, heard him coming in and out ten times a day, and could have accosted him on the landing.
Frank wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t a question of fear. It was much more subtle than that. It was a game he had invented, like the games he used to make up as a child, which he alone understood. It had usually been in his bed in the morning, while Madame Porse was preparing breakfast, and preferably when it was sunny outside. His eyes closed, he would think, for example, “Fly!”
Then he would half open his eyes, looking at a certain spot on the wallpaper. If there was a fly there, he won.
Now he might have said, “Destiny!”
Because he wanted destiny to pay attention to him, he had done everything to force it to, and he continued to defy it from morning to night. The day before, he had said in an offhand way to Kromer, “Ask your general if there’s anything else besides watches that he’d like to have.”
He didn’t need the money. Even at the rate he was going, he still had enough for months. There was nothing he needed. He had bought himself another overcoat—even flashier than the one he already had—light beige, of pure camel’s hair, a coat like maybe only five others in the whole town. It wasn’t quite warm enough for the season, but he wore it out of bravado. Likewise, he always carried his automatic in his pocket, although it was uncomfortably heavy and might one day, in spite of his green card, put him in a bad spot.
He didn’t want to be a martyr. He didn’t want to be a mere victim. But it did him good to think, as he walked around the neighborhood, especially at night, that a shot might suddenly come out of the shadows.
No one took any notice of him. Even Holst didn’t seem to, and yet Frank had done enough to attract his attention.
Sissy must hate him. Anybody else, after what he’d done, would have moved out of the building.
Destiny was lying in ambush somewhere. But where? Instead of waiting for it to appear in its own good time, Frank went out looking for it, poking around everywhere in his search. He was calling out to it just as he had done when he held out the bag with the key at arm’s length in the vacant lot. “Here I am. What are you waiting for?”
He didn’t have enough enemies so he had to make new ones. Wasn’t that why he had slapped Bertha? And now, whenever Minna was even a little affectionate, or slightly attentive, he would say, to wound her, “I hate bellyachers.”
He would bring chocolates to Anny, who never shared them with the others and never thanked him. He liked to look at her. He could have looked at her body for hours, but there was no satisfaction in taking her to bed. It bored her, too. The second time he came to her room, she had sulked, “Again?”
Though her body was a work of art, it was all she had. And it seemed lifeless, without animation. She placed it wherever or however you wanted it, as though to say, “Look at it, touch it, do whatever you want with it, only hurry up.”
Bertha left on Thursday. At three o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, he was on the street when he noticed the tenant from the third floor standing in front of a shop window. Only later did it occur to him that
the man had been looking at a display of corsets. It must have been an hour later. Frank had gone with an acquaintance named Kropetzki to eat pastry at Taste’s. Ressl, the editor in chief, was there. At Taste’s Frank felt at home. It had the refined atmosphere he liked, and he had seldom seen a woman as well dressed, as pedigreed, as the one with Ressl.
Ressl did him the honor of greeting him with a little wave of his hand. Frank and his companion listened to the chamber music—Taste’s was one of the few places left in town where you could still hear it after five o’clock in the afternoon. He thought of the violinist, because the one playing was tall and thin.
Had they shot him? People were always in a panic about being shot, but more often than not, one fine day, those who were said to have been killed came home again. Only a few of them spoke of torture. Unless the ones who said nothing were too frightened to talk.
The thought of torture made his heart skip a beat, and yet he wasn’t really afraid. Would he be able to hold up under torture? He was sure he would. It was a question he often thought about. He had been familiar with it even before torture became a subject of general concern. When he was little, he had hurt himself for fun, sticking a pin into his skin in front of a mirror and watching for the spasm of pain to cross his face.
They wouldn’t torture him. They wouldn’t dare. The others used torture, too. At least that was what people said.
Why should they torture him when he had nothing to reveal?
In a few days it would be Christmas. Another sham Christmas. He had never known, except as a small child, anything but sham Christmases. Once, when he was seven or eight years old, he had come to town at this season of the year, when the streets were all lighted up like a ballroom. Men in heavy coats and women in furs hurried through the streets. Merchandise was piled up in the shop windows, which looked like they were about to overflow.
They would put up a little tree in Lotte’s salon, as they did every year. It was mostly for the clients. Who would be there? Minna must have a family. Even if the girls never thought about their families during the rest of the year, they remembered them at Christmas. As for Anny, no one knew where she had come from. Maybe she’d stay. She’d probably be happy to stuff herself and then bury her nose in magazines.
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