Dirty Snow (29 page)

There was always the window above the gymnasium, the window that might have been his window, the woman who might have been Sissy.

At last they made up their minds, one morning when it had begun to snow again. The sky was so black and lowering that it seemed they were running ahead of schedule. They had gone to the other classroom first. He hadn't thought it would happen like this. Then, leaving the three men they had selected on the walkway, they opened his door with a shove.

He was ready. No use putting on his overcoat. He knew all about it. He hurried. He didn't want to keep the others waiting in the cold. In the half-light he tried to make out their features, and it was the first time he felt any curiosity at all about the men in the other classroom.

They made them march in single file along the walkway. Funny! He had turned up his collar like the others!

And he had forgotten to look at the window, he had forgotten to think. He would have all the time in the world afterward.

Tucson (Arizona)

20 March 1948

W
HAT IS
noir? The old saw about pornography applies: You will know it when you see it. Varying in temperature from downbeat to gloomy—in other words, below freezing in either case—varying in locale from urban ghettos to squalid little towns controlled by political machines, noir is actually surprisingly unvaried. Think betrayal, think murder, think secrecy and crookedness, and you're pretty much there. But for much the same reason that the most threatening street in the red-light district may support a plush, safe bar or even a business-class hotel, noir's grittiest page-turners are sometimes inhabited by heroes who are strangely—heroic. Raymond Chandler's protagonist, the private eye Marlowe, to whom the word “hardboiled” has been so often attached that it's now stuck to his shoe like chewing gum, is actually a softy: compassionate, even ethical in the bourgeois sense. He doesn't mind being nasty to stuck-up rich bitches or hiding the occasional dead body; all the same, he preserves what strikes this reader as a comically dated horror of drugs and pornography, he avoids sexual gratification on the job, and, above all, he'll never betray a client, much less a friend. Loyalty! Decency! As technology and corporatism impel us more and more to treat one another like things, those two words approach irrelevance, except between intimates, and sometimes even then. This is why with each passing decade, Marlowe's corpse decomposes ever more rapidly into a skeleton of outright sentimentality. To some readers he already seems as quaint as Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer.

A couple of centuries from now (assuming that there will still be human beings to stain the snows of this earth), Simenon's protagonist Frank Friedmaier may be considered more or less repellent than he now appears, depending on the sensibilities of that age, but he's hardly likely to suffer Marlowe's fate. In fact, he is almost inhumanly horrific. Chandler's novels are noir shot through with wistful luminescence; Simenon has concentrated noir into a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star.

How has he done it? Part of his artistry consists of limiting Frank's life and crimes, not to mention his whole world, to a scale as petty as a prison yard, thereby bringing Hannah Arendt's old phrase, “the banality of evil,” to life. And of course Frank's evil is banal not to us, which would have meant that he bored us, but to Frank himself. Oh, no, he scarcely bores us; on the contrary, some of his doings are almost unbearable to read of. But what he does approaches pointlessness. The crimes of an inmate of Marlowe's world have their objects; the plot unfolds more logically than life itself.
Dirty Snow
is no improvement on life itself. This is why Frank reminds me less of Marlowe than of some Chekhov character, a provincial mediocrity condemned to swelter in his own dullness. Now magnify dullness until all possibilities are frozen and filthy.
Dirty Snow
is the aptest title I could imagine.

One fundamental question that this book raises is: Does every human being seek to evolve, even if unknowingly? Is Frank abnormal in this regard, or are his mother's whores and his own thuggish acquaintances more than they seem? In my own bread-and-butter work (I am a journalist) I travel to nasty places. Based on what I see there, it seems to me that brutality and immiseration compel the human majority to exhaust itself in what my interpreter in the Congo kept calling
the struggle for life
. In the world of
Dirty Snow
, that struggle occupies most people. The tenants of Frank's building hate him not only because he is hateful and because they disapprove of his mother's business, but also because they are cold and hungry while he isn't.

Chekhov encourages us to believe, and I myself prefer to believe, that within us all hides a spark of something more than mere consciousness; that spark is called potentiality, and its common failure to become what it could have been is tragedy. Another place this theme is worked out is
Middlemarch
, George Eliot's longish nineteenth-century masterpiece where the characters live at some remove from noir: there Lydgate sets out to revolutionize the field of medicine but corrupts himself with a foolish marriage in which his social-climbing wife runs up ruinous bills; Dorothea marries pedantic Mr. Casaubon because she longs to devote herself to her husband's great scholarly work, only to find that his project is the feeblest phantasm. What about the struggle for life? And yet even if everybody could be sufficently well housed and fed, most of us would be lucky to approach Lydgate's level of aspiration, and disappointment.

Thanks to his mother, Frank doesn't have to worry about the struggle for life at all. He possesses the freedom to aspire to be more than he is. He's at Lydgate's level. What makes
Dirty Snow
so haunting is that unlike Lydgate or Dorothea, or even Chekhov's three sisters who only know that they are unhappy and keep vaguely dreaming about going to Moscow, Frank never articulates what it is that he is looking for. Furthermore, the spark in him is not very nice.

To get right down to it, Frank despises what he gets. Without understanding himself or the world in which he finds himself, he sets out to pollute everything. Marlowe might have gotten dirty, but he aspired to be an agent of truth and even salvation, although sometimes he only accomplished finality. Frank for his part is nothing more or less than an agent of corruption.

But how intensely human he is! Here is Simenon's genius. Frank wants to be recognized. He wants to be
known
. He scarcely knows himself, or anything else worth knowing. But if he can somehow stand revealed to the gaze of the Other, then maybe he will achieve some sort of realization. Don't you and I want to be more real than we are? And wouldn't it be convenient if somebody else could help us get there? All we have to do is move to Moscow or marry Mr. Casaubon.

This theme is very subtly articulated at first; certainly it remains almost invisible to Frank himself. The plot begins on page one with Frank's desire to be noticed. To fulfill that desire, he will commit a meaningless murder.

Frank's “friend” Kromer (I use the word because Simenon introduces him as such; I use the quotation marks because of course Frank has no friends in any human sense) once strangled a woman with whom he was copulating because she dared to hope that he was making her pregnant, and because, worse yet, “she had kept getting more tender and clinging.” So it follows that Kromer wouldn't have killed her if he hadn't been fucking her; and the relationship between sex and death becomes still more pronounced when Simenon remarks:

Frank's story is far more shocking and squalid than Dorothea's, of course. It is up to you to decide whether it is more or less “tragic.” The gap between Dorothea's aspiration and the far more limited reality which marks her best effort is measurable. In Frank's case, both the goal and the achievement remain at such a low level, so close to the desperately brutish struggle for life, that it's necessary to ask: Which is worse (and obviously I'm not speaking here in an ethical sense) Dorothea's gaping failure or the sickening meanness of Frank's potentiality?

Let's just suppose for a minute (in which case
Dirty Snow
would be an entirely different book) that Frank chose to express his identity by joining the Resistance (I capitalize this in World War II form because
Dirty Snow
is despite itself a World War II novel). After all, the occupiers are ruthlessly oppressive, and violence against them would be justified. All right, so we've supposed it and it's inconceivable. Why? Dystopian novels usually create some sort of opposition between tyranny and its victims, in order to highlight the wickedness of the former. Even Orwell's
1984
endows its hero and heroine with sensitivity, in order to appall us with the ultimate destruction of that sensitivity in the torture chambers of the Ministry of Truth. But as we rotate our telescope through Frank's universe, we seem to find an awful lot of people who don't express any sensitivity at all. The best of them—Holst, Sissy, old Mademoiselle Vilmos whom Frank robs and murders—are no better than atomized. The rest are simply brutes.

Frank's first victim, the Eunuch, is typical of
Dirty Snow
's environs, which is to say of the struggle for life. This fellow scarcely deserves our pity at all. He compels the prostitutes at Timo's to eat and drink; he finger-fucks them in front of others; he lays down his gunbelt on the table as they eat. To Frank, none of these acts are particularly interesting or relevant (like Marlowe, he's seen it all), but all of the sudden, in what he slyly pretends to be a non sequitur, Simenon articulates Frank's thoughts for him as follows: “So wasn't it natural that—since he had to kill someone sometime—he would think of the Eunuch?” Of course, nobody really does think of the Eunuch, not Simenon, not us; we're not even present at his murder; he's nothing but another nasty placeholder, a two-dimensional piece of work who's promptly swallowed up in the dirty snow. We don't care. He's nothing.

But the decision to slay him, unlike the erotic decision to which it has been normatively compared, goes far beyond callous bravado to outright self-destructiveness. To kill a member of the occupying forces would be nearly suicidal under any circumstances; to kill him without any particular motive is—well, it's certainly peculiar. And this is what makes Frank such a haunting character. The struggle for life alone cannot explain him. Frank doesn't know what he's about, and it is a measure of his sickness (and his world's) that all he can think of to do in order to discover himself is to commit acts of violence and betrayal.

Frank for his part proposes a more rational explanation for the crime: if he gets the Eunuch's gun he'll be able to impress a certain Berg, another non-friend whom he doesn't care about. Ayn Rand once wrote: “You have to flatter other people whom you despise in order to impress other people who despise you.” It's beyond that: Frank has to flatter someone to whom he's indifferent in order to impress someone who's indifferent to him, and he knows all along that even if Berg is impressed, Frank will remain indifferent to that, too. In short, the motive is absurd, in keeping with the deed.

Here my editor advises: “Avoid this word” (absurd) “as carrying too much baggage? Also, the idea of the absurd suggests the ‘motiveless crime' of Gide's Lafcadio, and this crime isn't motiveless, it just isn't explained by the reasons Frank supplies.” But what if Frank wants those reasons to be absurd? If so, why would he?

We cannot ever ascertain whether Frank sets out to be caught, but he is certainly willing to increase his chances of getting caught in order to experience something or learn something, though he doesn't know quite why. Why else would he
want
Holst to see him lie in wait for the Eunuch? “Had Frank perhaps coughed out of childish impulse? That was too simple, too pat.” We're told that the idea of Holst's knowing that Frank is the murderer “excites” Frank, that there's a “secret bond” between them. The exchanged gazes between the man and the boy come to take on a deeply intimate, almost erotic character for Frank, much like his impulse to the murder of the Eunuch. Holst is the one he murders the Eunuch for. (Why not say so? He didn't do it for Berg.) Holst is the one he fondles Holst's daughter for.

In short, Holst could be described as the key to Frank's soul. What exactly does Holst “mean”? We'll never know. (Love, kindness, fellowship; Frank rages against all these. Holst seems, insofar as we can tell, to be a decent and perhaps cultivated man. Why then does Frank not murder him?) Like so many other characters in this novel, he's delineated partially and sparingly. And in passing I want to call attention to another measure of Simenon's artistry: the enigmatic relations between Frank and Holst tease the mind; yet they take up an astonishingly small proportion of the page count.

What precisely do we know? Simenon reminds us explicitly that Frank lacks a father—that's the gist of it; Holst for his part (as we learn during their meeting in the prison) evidently sees Frank as a filial surrogate, for he compares him to his own son who stole mercury and platinum to finance his studies; the difference, of course, is like the difference between Frank and Dorothea: Frank has no goal, no studies apart from his own perverse search for self-awareness, of which he can scarcely be said to be aware; and he squanders the proceeds of his crimes. (The similarity is that both Holst's son and Frank commit suicide.) Frank's desire for Holst to be his father, and Holst's desire for the violator of his daughter to be his son, seem off the mark, somehow, not quite comprehensible, maybe pathological. This meeting with Holst and Sissy, which Simenon grotesquely refers to as a wedding, could be the one false note in the book. “Destiny had given him a gift …” But Frank, as Simenon has already explained, “had spent the greater part of his life … hating destiny with an almost personal hatred.”