The Dark Meadow

by Andrea Maria Schenkel

  Hetsch stands there grinning at her. ‘What do you think I mean? I mean you can think yourself lucky if I take you, because no one else will, not with your brat by the Frenchman. Who knows how many others you’ve had? No one knows, not with a waitress in a bar.’

  This time it is Afra who goes up to him and stands with her face close to his.

  ‘You get out of here this minute. Go away.’

  At that moment they both hear a loud noise. With presence of mind, Afra says, ‘That’s my mother up in the bedroom under the attic, so be off with you, because she’ll hear me if I call for her.’

  She tries not to let her fear or the fact that she is lying show.

  He thinks of saying something to her, glares at her briefly, but then goes to the door without a word. Then he turns to her once more.

  ‘You know something, Afra? I’ll get you in the end. You’ll have no other option. Poor folk like your family are starvelings, and your father’s getting odder all the time. You can throw me out now, but I tell you one thing: I’ll be back. And then I’ll show you what a real man’s like. You’ll be grateful when I do come back.’

  Afra stands there rubbing her forearm. She is trembling all over.

  ‘Not for the world, Hetsch, not for the world!’

  ‘We’ll see about that. You won’t get rid of me so easily. I always get what I want.’

  And with these words he goes out.

  Afra stands in the kitchen a little longer, waiting to be sure he is out of the house, and only then does she go over to the bedroom to see what made the noise. The window of the bedroom is wide open. The wind must have blown it open, and the window frame must have hit the wardrobe and made the noise. The little earthenware vase that was standing on the far corner of the windowsill has fallen to the floor and broken into many fragments. Afra goes over to the window and bolts it shut. Albert has run after her. He is picking up the bits of the vase, curious about them.

  ‘No, Albert, you’ll hurt yourself. I’ll sweep it all up later.’

  She takes his hand and goes out of the house. There’s no one in sight. She is still upset and trembling all over. She breathes deeply, tries to concentrate on the work she must do next. She takes the basket off the bench and goes back into the kitchen. It’s time to make her father’s mid-morning snack. Albert is crawling over the kitchen floor, playing with a piece of wood and chattering to himself as if nothing had happened. She bends down to him, takes the piece of wood away, and puts a crust of stale bread into his hand instead.

  ‘There’s a bit of bread, or you’ll be eating that stick.’

  She strokes his head and kisses his forehead.

  ‘You get everywhere, you do; there’s no taking my eyes off you for a minute.’

  Tired, ponderous, she straightens up and goes out to the pantry. Dark clouds have come up outside. Afra looks through the window at the washing hanging on the line. She will have to bring it in before the storm breaks. At that same moment, a gust of wind blows the pantry window open just a crack.

  Theres

  Whenever she thought of that day again later it all came straight back, the uneasy feeling that came over her when she set out on her bicycle in the morning to do her errands. It wasn’t as if she had any real reason to feel uneasy. Afra had been wringing out the washing in the open air, and the little boy had still been sleeping peacefully in his bed. Johann had gone out to mow the meadow beside the railway embankment. Theres wanted to hurry and be back home as soon as possible, so that Afra and her father wouldn’t start quarrelling again. Over the last few weeks not a day had passed without an argument between the two of them. Sometimes it was about the child – too noisy, too spoilt. Or then again it might be Afra’s refusal to go to church. From month to month the trouble between father and daughter had been getting steadily worse.

  But then she had been held up; her last customer, the miller’s wife, hadn’t been able to make up her mind, and so in the end she cycled away from Einhausen much too late. Even from a distance she saw the washing still hanging on the line in the yard, and she knew that her presentiment had been correct.

  The policeman who came out of the house and walked towards her didn’t have to explain. She knew that something terrible had happened, although at that moment it wasn’t clear to her that the Lord God had taken all she had away from her. She had sat down on the bench and waited. The doctor came first, and then the police officers from town. At some point the priest was there, and they had accompanied her to the priest’s house. When she thought about it now it was all so blurred, so unreal. She stayed there in the presbytery for the first few days until she was better and could go home.

  When she spoke to Johann for the first time since his arrest, he swore to her that he hadn’t done it, and she believed him.

  It was in the following weeks that rumours began going around, saying that Johann had killed Afra because he had thought she was possessed by the devil. Or that the Frenchman, the child’s father, had turned up, and since Afra wouldn’t let him take the little boy away he had killed them both. Every day, it seemed to Theres, a new rumour emerged. She was at a loss, and when in the end she just didn’t know what to do, she went to the police. She said it couldn’t have been Johann, because he had sworn to her on all that was sacred to him that he hadn’t done it. The officers were friendly but firm. They told Theres she would have to reconcile herself to the fact, hard as it was for her, that her daughter and her grandson had both been killed by her husband, and he had confessed to the crime several times to the investigating officer. If he was denying it to her, his wife, it was only because he had not entirely lost all sense of shame and couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.

  *

  Then Theres went home, lay down in bed, and after she had cried all night she began rearranging her life. It wasn’t for the first time. She had had to cope with the child Afra on her own after Johann was taken away that time in the past and placed in protective custody. She had learnt to live with the way, when he was released, he screamed in his sleep almost every night. When she couldn’t bear it anymore she used to get up and go into the kitchen, where she would sit on the bench next to the crucifix and look out at the dark. Until she was finally so tired that she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. Sometimes she still had the strength to go back to bed, but usually she slept sitting at the kitchen table.

  When Albert was born, and Johann didn’t want to live with the shame of it, she had been the one who held the family together. He still had his God, he wanted to force everyone to stay on the straight and narrow path, and was he supposed to have killed the two of them? He had been stubborn and strange these last few months. He had no patience with the child, and he saw only the worst in Afra, yet she found it hard to believe what people told her.

  Every morning she got up, tidied the house, went to the graveyard, put flowers on the grave, and on Sunday she went to Mass. Once a month she made the long journey to see Johann in prison.

  And she told anyone who asked to her face that it couldn’t have been Johann, because he had sworn to her that it wasn’t, by God and all that was sacred to him, and she believed him.

  The Doctor

  When the doctor drove up in his car the old woman was hunched on the bench beside the house. The police officer who had stayed behind with her husband had told her that she couldn’t go in until his colleague was back with the murder squad. The doctor spoke to her kindly, felt her pulse and gave her an injection, and then told her to wait there, he would send a message to her neighbours and they would look after her. She couldn’t go into the house until the investigating team had done their work, and that would be best for her at the moment anyway. She should think of staying with friends or relations for now, he said, at least until everything was cleared up. She sat there, looked at him and nodded.

  Then he went into the kitchen. The policeman and Johann Zauner were sitting at the table. The policeman jumped up when the doctor came in and said
good afternoon, but the old man sat where he was, never moving from the spot.

  The next thing he noticed was the remains of a mid-morning snack still on the table. A glass of water, half full, a piece of bread with a bite taken out of it, some smoked meat and cheese. The knife lay beside the plate. Later he would point this, in particular, out to the public prosecutor’s office. He was to say:

  ‘Johann Zauner was sitting beside the two bodies lying on the floor, not moving. He had made himself a snack in the middle of all that chaos, he wasn’t letting anything spoil his appetite even though his grandson was lying there in his own blood, dying. He didn’t care at all about the boy. Or about his daughter lying on the sofa with her skull smashed in.’

  He would go on to say, in his evidence, ‘Although Johann Zauner is a devout Catholic and a member of the Third Order of St Francis, he is a cold, unemotional man, for how else could he sit beside the dead bodies eating?’

  *

  The doctor had only just arrived when the murder squad’s vehicles also arrived outside the house. One of the police officers told Zauner to get dressed so that he could go to the police station with them. But when he made no move to do as he was told, they took him away just as he was. They led him to the car standing outside the house.

  From the evidence of the former member of the police force Josef Weinzierl, eighteen years after the events concerned

  I’d joined the police back then, but I soon realized it wasn’t the job for me. So when my father died suddenly of blood poisoning, and my elder brother never came home from prison camp in Russia, I chucked it all in and took over the butcher’s shop my father used to keep.

  I was there when the daughter and grandson of Zauner the cottager were found dead.

  And I was the one left alone for quite a while with the old man out there.

  I did look more closely at the young woman’s body when Irgang had left. I was young at the time, and inquisitive, the way you are at that age. I wasn’t scared, and the sight didn’t give me the creeps. If a person’s dead then they’re dead. Nothing to be done about it.

  I must say she was a good-looking girl, that Afra. Had a lovely face and thick dark hair, very striking. She sent the lads crazy. And you may well think that didn’t suit the bigoted old man. One bastard in the family was enough for him. The way she lay there you could almost have thought she was asleep. Only you didn’t want to look at her hands, they were all scratched. She must have defended herself with all her might. Her fingernails were bloody, and some of them broken off, and she had a deep cut between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand.

  And the kitchen was in a right mess! Broken china all over the floor. There was a little hoe lying half under the sofa, like someone had tried to push it right under with his foot.

  I told Zauner to stay put on his chair, but I didn’t need to, he sat there the whole time anyway. Just staring straight ahead of him. Two or three times he said something, sounded like ‘Nothing to be done now,’ and ‘Two birds with one stone.’ What he meant by that I’ve no idea, because when I asked him he didn’t say.

  After I’d looked around a bit I sat down too, and we both waited.

  There was a jug of water on the table, and two glasses. And a plate and a bread-knife as well.

  When I have to wait time goes so slowly, and then I always get hungry. I’ve been like that since I was little. I get low blood sugar, and that brings on a headache and I can’t think properly. So I always have something to eat with me. But it was outside with my bike. I knew I shouldn’t really let the old man out of my sight, but I was so hungry. I couldn’t stand it no more. I told Zauner to go on sitting there while I nipped out to get the bag with my sandwich from the bike. I was ever so quick, it didn’t take three minutes.

  When I got back in, old Zauner was gone. I said to myself, now you’ve gone and done it, letting a murderer get away from your very first crime scene.

  I turned and went back into the corridor, but then I saw the door to the bedroom was open. He was in there. I went in on tiptoe. Very quiet like, so’s he wouldn’t notice me watching him. The old man was kneeling beside the bed searching in the bedside table. I looked a little, sideways, and I could see he had a purse in his hand. And a box of letters on the floor beside it. Looked like he was either going to get it all out or put it back specially. First I was surprised, then the scales kind of fell from my eyes. Hey, I says to myself, the cunning old devil, he’s laying a false trail. Trying to pretend there’s been a robbery with murder here.

  That made me furious, so I shouted at him to go and sit down again and look sharp about it.

  ‘You just get back on that chair,’ I shouted at him, and he jumped and went back into the kitchen, not another squeak out of him. Then he stayed sitting there, he didn’t dare do nothing else.

  I picked up the money and the papers and gave them to our colleagues from the CID.

  Then I sat down at the kitchen table with him again and unpacked my snack. I got two bites of it and then Dr Heunisch arrived. Couldn’t go on eating then, what would it have looked like? Then all at once it went very fast. Almost as soon as the doctor arrived so did the CID men.

  Even then I knew I wasn’t going to stay on in the police, and a few months later, even before the case came to court, I chucked it all in, like I said. No one never asked about my snack, no, why would they?

  Oh, I almost forgot one thing. When I was out there with my bike, old Zauner’s wife arrived. I told her very sternly not to go into the house, I said she’d better sit down outside for the time being. It wouldn’t be long, I said, and it wasn’t. Then our CID colleagues had to tell her that her daughter was dead and her grandson too. No, she didn’t get to hear of it from me, not that I can remember.

  Johann

  Afra had left home, and then she came back again. That was around the end of the war. He hadn’t asked what brought her back, and when she told him about the baby she was going to have he still didn’t say anything at first. Even if he didn’t think it right that she had no father for the child. But as the months went on his anger grew and grew, and he gave vent to it. He ranted and raged. However, none of the quarrelling did any good. In time, he came to think that Afra and Theres were in league behind his back. They would laugh at him, hide things so he couldn’t find them, just to work him into a white-hot fury.

  It simply wasn’t true. He could remember everything. All the stories from the old days. It was only sometimes he couldn’t think of a thing, and that was only when he really wanted to remember it, but that was normal at a certain age. He got cross or angry only when something didn’t come back to his mind at once, and Afra and Theres thought he was getting peculiar because of that.

  *

  He sat down on the plank bed, and waited, and all at once he felt sure that this time, too, they’d let him go after eight weeks.

  ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …’

  From the evidence of Detective Superintendent Ludwig Pfleiderer, now retired, eighteen years after the events concerned

  Criminal Investigator Hecht took on the case at the time. He always came down hard on capital crimes. Hecht being the word for a pike as well as a surname, we always used to call him ‘the pike in the carp pond’. That speaks for itself.

  He was a tough one – when he heard we had a case of murder or manslaughter, he scented blood, you couldn’t get him off the case.

  He didn’t want anyone else with him when he talked to a defendant. Hecht would disappear with the man into a little cell, and he didn’t come out until he had a confession. And they all confessed to him.

  I can see him before me to this day, the way he always grinned from ear to ear once he had that confession. He’d put it down on the desk in front of me and say, ‘Herr Pfleiderer, Herr So-and-so has confessed.’ And that was it.

  His methods were successful, and a successful
man is always right. No one asked about the rules and regulations, we let a few things pass in Hecht’s case. It wouldn’t do any more these days, but right after the war … We were glad of every competent colleague we could get who didn’t have a cloud over him, and I’m afraid you can’t ask Hecht now – he’s been dead five years. A heart attack, just three weeks after he took retirement. He fell over and that was that.

  Theres

  Two women stand among the graves near the entrance to the graveyard. Theres almost passed them before she noticed them. Automatically, without intending to, she looked their way. The women moved even closer together, trying to hide behind the gravestones. They looked to old Theres like big black crows. She didn’t need to hear their voices to know what they were whispering to each other. ‘Look, her over there, that’s Zauner’s wife.’

  ‘Ooh, how she slinks over the graveyard! Fancy her daring to come here on a day like this!’

  ‘The old man killed Afra on account of that bastard child.’

  ‘Went with a Frenchman, Afra, didn’t she? And then her own father killed her. It’s a sin and a shame.’

  ‘But you never know, maybe there was more to it. Old Zauner was locked up once before, under the Nazis. Once a convict always a convict, that’s what they say.’

  ‘That story about the Frenchman, I know all about that. Heard it from my sister-in-law who married over in Polzhausen, that’s where Afra worked as a waitress.’

  ‘There’s bad blood in that family.’

  Theres went on, acting as if she hadn’t seen the two women. Since the terrible thing happened the villagers put their heads together when they saw her coming. It wasn’t the dead that you had to fear, it was the living.

  They had all turned up for the funeral. The whole graveyard had been full, she had never seen so many people all at once before. They had been standing on the graves and even the graveyard wall. Everyone wanted to cast a glance at the new grave. And they had all hoped that Johann would be there as well.