He doesn’t seem any happier than Frank does. On the contrary. He is a sad man, a scrupulous man. He does his duty without joy, maybe against his own conscience. He keeps his saliva-soaked cigar end between his lips, and it is starting to smell bad. He doesn’t object when Frank stubs out his cigarette on the floor and lights another.
He is what Frank would call a loser, a guy like Kropetzki, born to be kicked. There must be more important people in the next room: the door to it remains open, but only the top part is visible, because the counter is in the way. Frank and his companion have arrived during a lull. But no sooner has he lit his cigarette than the muffled sound of a fist hitting a face is heard; this isn’t followed by a groan, just the voice of the man doing the hitting, or someone else, asking, ‘Well?’
Frank is sorry he can’t see, but he doesn’t dare stand up; he waits for more blows to follow, and they do, just once eliciting a weak moan from the person receiving them.
‘Well, pig?’
Frank kept calm. He is sure of it. He has had eighteen days to think about it, which makes him all the more honest with himself.
What it aroused in him was curiosity. The first thing he asked himself was, ‘Is it true they strip them naked?’
It will probably be his turn soon. Why does that make him think of Minna’s insides? Because it is said they kick or knee you in your private parts. That makes him turn pale. Yet the fellow in the other room doesn’t flinch. In the moments of silence, his slightly sibilant breathing is audible.
‘Do you still say it wasn’t you?’
A blow. After a while it is possible to tell, from the noise, the part of the body that is being hit.
An avalanche of blows this time. Then a muted groan. Then nothing.
Just a few words uttered in a reproachful tone in a foreign language.
Has all this been arranged for his benefit? He will have to find out. It’s hard to believe, of course. He has stopped thinking like the people outside. But he doesn’t yet think like his neighbours. He is making an effort to stay clear-headed, not to exaggerate. He is convinced he will succeed. They won’t get one over on him.
Especially since it may be a test. He mustn’t talk that way to Lotte, or Kromer, or even Timo. He has come a long way since he last saw them. They haven’t. They continue to live their little lives, they continue to think in the same way, in such a way that they can’t advance.
He feels like smiling when he remembers what Timo told him about the green card and the sectors.
Is Frank in a sector now or not?
Is it an important sector?
If Timo passed by in the street and saw the gate with its sentry, he wouldn’t suspect a thing. You have to see things from the inside, and Frank is on the inside now. Will they admit that he is on the inside?
For his part, he is prepared to admit that there was some truth in what Timo said. Timo didn’t know it, he was just talking off the top of his head, the way people talk outside. The green card exists. The fact that it has been created means that it has its importance. The fact that it has its importance means that it really shouldn’t be wasted.
In the old days, to merely become a Freemason, as all civil servants were, you had to undergo tests.
That’s what Timo hasn’t understood, what neither he, nor the others, nor Frank have thought about. It isn’t because of that thought that he is calm – if it was he would despise himself – but he spends a certain amount of time every day considering it, he compares things, goes deeper into certain aspects of the matter.
Why, when they admitted him to the office, didn’t they do to him what they did to his predecessor? Two men took that one away, one holding him by his feet, the other by his head, because he had had what he could take, maybe more than he could take. They must have rushed it, been too hard. The chief wasn’t pleased. The word he uttered in a flat voice, hitting the table with a paper knife, probably meant, ‘Next!’
Frank’s companion stood up and slipped his cigar end into the pocket of his waistcoat. Frank also stood up, quite naturally.
Was he convinced at that moment that he would walk free a few minutes later and catch a tram going in the opposite direction?
He is no longer quite sure. There are questions he has asked himself too often, questions that become more complicated with every day that passes. There are some he keeps for the morning and others for the afternoon, for sunrise or sunset, for before or after the soup. That is another discipline, another thing he has to be strict with himself about.
‘Come!’
Did the man say ‘come’? Probably not. He didn’t say anything. He simply motioned to Frank to walk around the counter, or else led the way.
And then it became almost ridiculous. The chief he found himself facing didn’t look like a chief at all, any more than Mr Wimmer did. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was dressed in grey, with a jacket that was too tight, a collar that was too high, a badly knotted tie. He seemed quite cramped in his clothes.
He was a small, middle-aged man, like those in the offices where ration cards, coal coupons and other administrative odds and ends are distributed. He was wearing spectacles with lenses as thick as magnifying glasses and seemed to be waiting with a certain impatience for his lunch hour.
There is another vital question, which goes to the heart of the matter: Did they, or did they not, make a mistake?
Timo seemed to be implying that they are like everyone else, that one of their offices might quite well not know what’s going on in the next office. In the rations office, people who didn’t ask for it have sometimes received two cards instead of one by mistake, while others can’t get a lost card replaced.
It’s a serious question. You mustn’t let yourself get carried away, but it’s necessary to consider that possibility as carefully as the others. Nor must he forget to take into account that it was lunchtime, that the chief was hungry, and that he was also in a bad mood after his previous customer had passed out.
All the same, it is impossible to deduce anything specific from his behaviour. Did he even deign to look at Frank? Did he know who he was? Did he have a file in front of him?
When Frank was waiting in the other room, on the grey bench, there must have been five of them in the office, since there were now three: the chief sitting and the two others standing, including one who was quite young, younger than Frank, and badly dressed.
So, two standing and one sitting.
Frank immediately reached out his card across the desk. He had been holding it ready for half an hour. He had fingered it in his pocket all through the tram ride. If Timo was right, the old man might have shrugged his shoulders, or laughed.
He took the card and, without so much as glancing at it, put it down next to him on a pile of papers. Meanwhile, the two others calmly, methodically searched his pockets.
Nobody said a word to him. He wasn’t asked any questions. The man who had brought him in was standing in the doorway and didn’t particularly seem to be keeping an eye on him.
The old man must have been thinking of something, examining a file that wasn’t about him, and he let the contents of Frank’s pockets, including the wad of banknotes, pile up on the corner of his desk, without showing any curiosity.
Once the search was done, he looked up as if to say, ‘Are we finished?’
Remembering, the first man came and put the revolver down on the desk.
‘Is that it?’
Then at last, with a slight sigh, he picked up a long form, a sheet of paper of an unusual format, with printed words and blanks to fill in.
‘Frank Friedmaier?’ he asked, as if it was of no importance.
He wrote the name down in block capitals, then more than a quarter of an hour went by as he entered in a special column all the objects that had been found in Frank’s pockets, even down to a box of matches and a pencil stub.
They didn’t beat him. Nobody took any notice of him. If he had made a dash for the door and run outsi
de, it is likely that only the sentry would have fired at him and would probably have missed.
Is it so ridiculous to think it’s a test? Why would they give a green card to people they don’t know, people they aren’t sure of?
Why didn’t they beat him, like the other man? These things have no reason to take place in an office open to all and sundry.
He has done a lot of thinking in eighteen days. An enormous amount of thinking. Not just about that. He has had time to think about Christmas, the New Year, Minna, Anny, Bertha. They would be surprised, all of them, including Lotte, if they knew all he had discovered about them.
Not that it’s easy to think, because of the neighbours. Because here, just as in Green Street, there are neighbours. Yes, indeed, Mr Holst! Yes, indeed, Mr Wimmer! The difference here is that you don’t see them, and because of that you trust them even less than anywhere else.
They have been trying to get one over on him, ever since the first day, but he has been careful. He doesn’t trust a thing. He is becoming the least trusting man in the world. If his mother came to see him, he would wonder if it wasn’t they who sent her.
The neighbours knock on the walls, the pipes, the radiators. The heating doesn’t work, but the old radiators are still there.
It mustn’t be forgotten that they haven’t put him in a real prison, but in a school, a high school, which, from what he has seen of it, must have been quite posh.
His neighbours immediately started sending him messages. Why?
He is shrewd enough to have worked out the layout of the place and he has come to the conclusion that he is privileged. How many of them are there to his right? At least ten, as far as he can judge. From their accents – he sometimes catches a few words as they pass along the walkway – they are mainly working-class or country people.
Probably what the newspapers call saboteurs. Real ones or false ones? Or false ones mixed in with real ones?
He won’t let himself be taken in.
They didn’t beat him. They were polite to him. They searched him, but according to the rules. They took everything: his cigarettes, his lighter, his wallet, his papers. They even took his tie, belt and shoelaces. All the while, the old man continued to fill in the form with an absent air, and when he had finished he held out the sheet of paper and a pen, pointed to a dotted line and said, almost without an accent:
‘Sign here.’
He signed. He didn’t think. He signed mechanically. He doesn’t know what he signed. Was he wrong? Wasn’t it, rather, a way of showing them that he has nothing to hide? It wasn’t for fear of being beaten that he signed. He simply understood that it was an indispensable formality and that there would be no point in refusing.
That’s another thing he has thought a lot about, and he has no regrets. The only thing he regrets is that he opened his mouth and said, ‘I’d like—’
He didn’t have time to say anything more. The old man made a sign with his hand, and he was taken across a second courtyard, this one paved in brick, as far as he could judge from the paths dug out of the snow. What had he been about to say? What would he have liked? A lawyer? Surely not. He isn’t so naive. To get in touch with his mother? To reveal the name of the general? To inform Kromer, or Timo, or Ressl, who had remembered him at Taste’s and waved at him?
It’s a good thing he didn’t have time to finish his sentence. You have to wean yourself from the habit of saying pointless words.
He didn’t yet know that everything he saw mattered, and would matter a little bit more every day. You think: ‘a school’ and you have a conventional image of it. Whereas in some cases, the smallest details eventually become so precious that you feel angry with yourself for not having looked at them more closely.
A large inner courtyard, which must have struck him as all the larger because at that moment it was flooded with sunlight. There is a long, two-storey building, made of new bricks, and there are probably no inner staircases, because, just like on a boat, there are iron staircases on the outside, suspended corridors like walkways which give access to all the classrooms.
How many classrooms are there? He has no idea. He has an impression the place is huge. On the other side of the courtyard is another building, an assembly hall or a gymnasium, with tall windows like the windows of a church, slightly reminiscent of the tannery. Then there is the covered playground, part of which he has had in front of his eyes for eighteen days, with black wooden benches, desks and other school furniture piled up to the ceiling.
There may be bars on the windows, but it isn’t a real prison. There are hardly any guards to be seen. He once had a brief glimpse of two soldiers armed with submachine guns in the courtyard.
It is only at night, when the floodlights come on, that it becomes a bit more impressive.
As the windows don’t have shutters, the light stops you sleeping, or makes you wake with a start.
In fact, the reason there are no guards to be seen is that there must be a watchtower, complete with machine guns and bombs, up on the roof, which is where the floodlights are shone from. At certain hours, footsteps can be heard on an iron staircase that can’t lead anywhere else.
In any case, one way or another, for whatever reason, he isn’t being treated like an ordinary prisoner. He wasn’t wrong when he observed how polite – cold but still polite – the old man with glasses was towards him.
To his right, then, there are at least ten of them, sometimes more, impossible to know for certain, because there are constant changes. On the left, there are three, maybe four, and one of them is either sick or mad.
It isn’t a cell, it’s a classroom. What was it used for when the place was a school? For classes that didn’t contain many pupils, final-year classes, probably. For a classroom, it is small, but, for a cell, it is huge, not really suited for just one man. He finds it irksome, doesn’t know where to put himself. His bed seems tiny. It is an iron bed, from the former army, with no springs and with planks as a base. They haven’t given him a mattress. All he has is a coarse grey blanket that smells of disinfectant.
It disgusts him more than if it smelled of sweat or, worse still, if it was impregnated with human smells. These chemical smells make him think of a corpse. They probably only disinfect the blankets when they have been used for someone who has died. And men must have died in this room. Some inscriptions have been carefully erased. You still see hearts with initials, like on trees in the country, flags that can no longer be made out, but what most remains are the lines that have marked the days, with crossbars for the weeks.
It was hard for him to find an empty place, apart from the rest, for his own personal count, and he has already reached the third crossbar.
He doesn’t reply to the messages. He has decided not to reply to them, to not even attempt to understand. During the day, a soldier walks up and down on the walkway and every now and again sticks his face up against the windows. At night, they rely on the floodlights, and the sound of boots is rarely heard.
Since night falls early, there is soon a real din; the walls and pipes echo with it. He doesn’t understand any of it. All it would take would be effort and a little patience. It must be like a simplified Morse alphabet.
But he has no interest in it and never will have. He is alone. So much the better. They have done him the favour of leaving him alone, and that must mean something. Too bad if it means that his case is more serious. Anyway, he already has enough experience to doubt that.
From the room on the right, where new people are constantly brought in, others are taken out to be shot, if not every day, at least several times a week. It’s the room for the run-of-the-mill cases. It’s as if they come and draw from it at random, like a fish tank.
It happens just before daybreak. Do they manage to get any sleep? Often, there are those who moan or let out a great scream in the middle of the night. They are probably the young ones.
Two soldiers arrive from the courtyard, always two, and their steps echo on the i
ron staircase, then on the walkway. At first, Frank wondered each time if it was his turn. Now he no longer flinches. The footsteps come to a halt outside the classroom next door. Maybe, among those who are locked in it, there are some who studied in that very classroom?
Everyone breaks into a patriotic song; then, in the slowly lightening darkness, a vague glimpse of soldiers passing, preceded by two or three men.
If they are doing it deliberately, it’s carefully calculated. The hour is so well chosen that Frank hasn’t once been able to make out anyone’s features. Just shapes. Men walking with their hands behind their backs, without hats or coats in spite of the cold. And invariably the collars of their jackets are turned up.
They must be led to a last office, because more time passes, and day is breaking by the time footsteps cross the courtyard. It happens near the covered playground. With an extra two or three metres, Frank would be able to see everything through the window, but he never sees anything but the top part of the body of the officer commanding the firing squad.
He can go back to sleep. Because they let him sleep. He doesn’t know how it is in the other classrooms. Probably not the same, because there are always noises early. They leave him alone until they bring him his morning meal, an unsweetened acorn brew and a small piece of sticky bread.
That cow Bertha would be happy! But he has got used to it. He drinks to the last drop. He eats everything. He won’t let himself be brought low. He has had his plan worked out from the first day.
He only allows himself to think about such and such a subject at the right time. He has a whole timetable in his head. It’s sometimes hard to keep to it. Thoughts have a tendency to get mixed up. So to give himself time to relax, he stares at a black spot quite high up on the wall, where a crucifix must have hung when this place was a school.
‘Bertha’s a stupid whore, but it’s not her.’
But as it isn’t her turn yet, as it isn’t the turn of Green Street, he picks up his thoughts where he left off yesterday.
The Snow Was Dirty Page 14
