Dirty Snow (18 page)

After that it had been almost ridiculous. The chief official before whom he appeared didn't look like a chief official at all, any more than Monsieur Wimmer did. He wasn't in uniform. He was dressed in a gray suit with a coat that was too tight. His collar was too high, his tie carelessly knotted. He couldn't have been any stiffer or more awkward in his clothes.

He was a little man, middle-aged or more, like the ones who gave out ration cards and coal stamps—just another petty official. He wore glasses with thick lenses, like a jeweler's loupe, and he seemed to be waiting impatiently for lunch.

Here was another crucial question, one that went to the base of the problem:
Had they or hadn't they made a mistake?

Timo seemed to think they were like anybody else, that one of their departments might be altogether ignorant of what was going on in another. With rationing, for instance, people would receive two cards by mistake when they had only asked for one, while others who lost their cards could never get another.

It was serious. He mustn't fool himself, but he had to take this possibility into account as carefully as all the others. He mustn't forget, either, that it was lunch hour, that the chief was hungry and had just shown signs of annoyance when the preceding man passed out.

But it was impossible to draw any definite conclusions from his behavior. Had he deigned to glance at Frank? Did he know him? Did he have his file in front of him?

When Frank had been waiting on the gray bench in the adjoining room, there must have been five of them in the office. Now there were three, with the chief seated at the desk and the other two standing, one of them very young, even younger than Frank, and badly dressed.

Two standing. One seated.

Frank immediately handed his card across the desk. He had been holding it ready for the last half-hour. He was fingering it in his pocket during the whole trip in the streetcar. If Timo was right, the older man would have shrugged at him or sneered.

The older man took the card without bothering to glance at it and placed it near him on a pile of papers on the desk. The two others methodically but politely searched his pockets.

No one said anything. They didn't ask questions. The man who had brought him stood in the doorway, watching without any particular interest.

The older man must have been thinking about something else, looking at another file, while waiting for the contents of Frank's pockets, including the roll of bills, to pile up on the corner of the desk.

When the search was over, he raised his head as if to ask, “All through?”

The man who had arrested Frank remembered a detail. He came over and laid the revolver down.

“That's it?”

And at last, with a sigh, he picked up a lengthy document, a printed form with blank spaces to fill out.

“Frank Friedmaier?” he asked in a monotone.

He wrote down the name in block letters, then—it took nearly a quarter of an hour—in a special column he listed all the things in Frank's pockets, including a box of matches and a pencil stub.

They hadn't roughed him up. No one paid him any attention. If he had suddenly made for the door and run away at top speed, probably only the sentry would have sent a shot after him—and missed.

Was it really so ridiculous to think it was a test? Why would they give a green card to someone they didn't know and weren't sure of?

Why hadn't they hit him, like the other guy? Had they really hit the other guy? There was no way things like that could happen in an office where anybody could walk right in.

He had thought about it for eighteen days. He had thought about it at enormous length. And not only about that. He'd had time to think about Christmas, about New Year's, about Minna, Anny, and Bertha. And all of them, including Lotte, would have been very surprised to know what he found out.

Yet because of his neighbors it was hard to think. There were neighbors here as there were on the rue Verte. Yes, indeed, Monsieur Holst! Yes, indeed, Monsieur Wimmer! The difference was you didn't see them, and because of that you were less sure of them here than elsewhere.

They had been trying to get him since the first day, but he had been suspicious. He was suspicious of everything. He was about to become the most suspicious man in the world. If his mother showed up to see him, he would have wanted to know if she'd been sent by them.

His neighbors knocked on the walls, on the water pipes, the radiators. There was no heat, but the old radiators were still in place.

Of course, he wasn't in a real prison but in a school, a high school that, from what he had seen, must have been pretty classy.

Right away his neighbors had started sending messages. Why?

He hadn't been so preoccupied that he didn't notice the general layout of the place, and he realized that he was privileged. How many people were there to his right? At least ten, as far as he could tell. He caught a few words as they passed down the hall, and from their way of speaking, they must be workers or country people.

Probably what the papers called “saboteurs.” Real or false? Or false ones mixed in with the real ones?

He wasn't going to let himself be fooled.

They hadn't hit him. They'd been polite. They had searched him, but with perfect civility. They had taken everything: cigarettes, lighter, wallet, papers. They had made him take off his tie, belt, and shoelaces. All that time, the older man kept absentmindedly filling out the form, and when he was done he handed it with a pen to Frank, pointing to the dotted line and saying, almost without an accent, “Sign there.”

Frank had signed. He hadn't stopped to think. He had signed mechanically. He didn't know what he'd signed. Was that a mistake? Or, on the contrary, did it prove to them that there was nothing on his conscience? It wasn't because he was afraid of being hit that he had signed it. He simply understood it was an indispensable formality and that it would be entirely pointless to refuse.

He had thought a great deal about all that, too, and he had no regrets. If he regretted anything, it was opening his mouth to say, “I'd like—”

There wasn't time to say more. The old gentleman made a sign with his hand, and they led him off across a second courtyard, paved with brick, so far as he could tell from the paths that had been carved out in the snow. What had he been about to say? What would he have wanted? A lawyer? No—he wasn't that naïve. To communicate with his mother? To reveal the general's name? To contact Kromer, or Timo, or Ressl, who had remembered him at Taste's and waved to him?

It was lucky he hadn't finished his sentence. He had to get out of the habit of speaking pointless words.

He didn't know yet that everything he saw had its importance, and became a little more important with each day. You think “school.” And you have a ready-made image of it in your mind. But in some cases, the tiniest detail might one day become so precious that you would never forgive yourself for not having looked at it more carefully.

A large closed courtyard, which at first seemed even larger than it was, since just then it was flooded with sunlight. A building, two stories high, red brick, ran all along one side of it. Probably there were no stairs within since on the outside, like on a boat, there were iron ones with walkways between them connecting the various classrooms.

How many classrooms? He had no idea. He had an impression of vastness. On the other side of the courtyard was another building, the assembly hall or gym, lighted by tall windows like the windows of a church. It reminded him of the tannery. Then there was the covered playground he had been looking at from his window for the last eighteen days, with dark wooden school benches, desks, classroom furniture piled up to the roof.

Despite the bars on the windows, it wasn't a real prison. There were practically no guards to be seen. At night he'd caught a glimpse, as he passed through, of two soldiers armed with machine guns.

Only at night, when the searchlights played over the buildings, did it seem more daunting.

Since there were no shutters on the windows, the light kept him from sleeping—or woke him with a start.

In short, if there weren't any guards, it was because there was a watchtower on the roof with searchlights, machine guns, and grenades. He heard footsteps, sometimes, on an iron stairway that couldn't possibly lead anywhere else.

In any case and whatever the reason, it was obvious he wasn't being treated like an ordinary prisoner. He hadn't been wrong when he'd made a note of the politeness of the old gentleman with the glasses—a chilly politeness, but politeness all the same.

So to the right of him there were at least ten men, sometimes more, you never knew because there was always a lot of coming and going. To his left there were three, maybe four, and one was sick or insane.

It wasn't a cell, it was a classroom. What had it been used for when the building was a school? Courses in which only a few pupils enrolled, third- and fourth-year courses, most likely. For a classroom it was small, but for a cell it was huge, much too big for one person. It bothered him, since he didn't know what to do with himself. His bed seemed tiny. It was an iron bed, an old army cot, with boards instead of springs. They hadn't given him a mattress. All he had was a rough gray blanket that smelled of disinfectant.

That was a lot more disgusting than the smell of sweat, more disgusting than if the blanket had reeked with human odors. The chemical scent made him think of a corpse. They probably only disinfected blankets after the people who'd been using them died. And men must have died in this room. Certain inscriptions had been carefully erased. But you could still see hearts with initials in them—like the ones on trees in the country—flags that were impossible to identify, and everywhere the vertical scratches that marked the days, with a crossbar for each week.

It had been difficult for him to find a clean spot of his own. Now he was on his third crossbar.

He didn't reply to the messages. He had decided not to, not even to try to understand. During the day a soldier paced up and down the walkway, looking through the windows at the prisoners from time to time. At night they relied on the searchlights, and the tread of boots was seldom heard.

Night fell early, and the racket soon broke out. The walls and pipes rang. He didn't understand any of it. It wouldn't have required much effort, only a little patience. Probably it was some sort of simplified Morse code.

He decided, once and for all, not to pay attention. He was alone. So much the better. They had done him the favor of putting him by himself, and that must mean something. So much the worse if it meant that his case was more serious. He had enough experience to doubt it.

From the room on the right, where new prisoners were brought all the time, they took them out to be shot, not every day but several times a week. It was the holding cell. They seemed to select them at random, like fish out of a pond.

It always happened just before daybreak. How did they manage to sleep? Some moaned or cried out in the middle of the night. Probably the young ones.

Two soldiers would come from the courtyard, always two, boots clanging up the iron stairs and down the walkway. At first, Frank had wondered each time if it was his turn. Now he remained unmoved. The steps always stopped outside the classroom next door. Had some of the people shut up inside once studied there?

Then everybody started shouting a patriotic song, and you saw vague forms passing in the dim light, two or three prisoners followed by a couple of soldiers.

If they did it like that on purpose, it was a stroke of genius. The hour was so well chosen that Frank was never able to distinguish anyone's features. Only silhouettes. Men walking, hands behind their backs, without hats or overcoats in spite of the cold. And invariably with their collars turned up.

They must take them into an office one last time, because there was a wait and the sun was already coming up when footsteps crossed the courtyard. It took place near the covered playground. A few yards nearer and Frank would have been able to see it from his window. As it was, all he ever saw was the upper part of the body of the commanding officer of the firing squad.

Afterward he slept. Because they let him sleep. He didn't know what happened in the other classrooms. Something else, since there was always a lot of noise early in the morning. As for him, they didn't bother him until they brought his breakfast, a gruel made out of acorns without any sugar in it together with a little piece of gluey bread.

It would have been all right for Bertha, that cow. But he managed. He sucked down the gruel to the last drop. He ate the bread. He wasn't going to give in. He had set up a routine on the very first day.

He wouldn't permit himself to think about a particular subject other than at its appointed time. He had a complete schedule in his head. Sometimes it was difficult to keep to it. His thoughts had a way of getting mixed up. Then, to relax, he would stare at a black spot on the wall, high up, where the crucifix must have hung when this had been a classroom.

“Bertha is a stupid bitch … but it wasn't her.”

But since it wasn't the right time, since it wasn't the moment to think about the rue Verte, he went back to the point where he'd left off speculating the day before.

Often Sissy or Holst interrupted him. Sissy, for example, coming to pick up her bag with the key in it, when in fact he didn't know whether she had ever picked it up, or even if she'd seen it. It wasn't important, but it was forbidden by his rules. As for Holst, he had become, you could say, Public Enemy Number One. He kept cropping up all the time, in his gray felt boots, his overcoat, with his tin lunch box and his droopy frame. Oddly, Frank never could see his face. It was just a blur. Or, more exactly, an expression.

What expression? If he wasn't careful, he'd go on thinking about it for minutes and minutes—too long, at any rate, since there was no way to keep track of the time. If necessary, he'd have to measure it by his pulse.