“I stared at the old woman. There it was, the bequest I had been waiting for. It felt like a mockery.
“But now finally the head doctor came with an assistant and two nurses; we were sent out, and I took leave of Frau Schrott.
“‘Good-bye, stay well,’ I said stupidly, feeling embarrassed and wanting nothing more than to get away as quickly as possible, whereupon she started to giggle and the head doctor gave me a peculiar look; the scene was awkward, to say the least; I was glad to leave the old woman, the priest, the whole assembly behind me and finally step out into the hallway.
“Everywhere I looked, there were visitors with packages and flowers. Everything smelled of hospital. I fled. The exit was near; in my mind, I was already outside in the park. But then a very large man in dark, formal clothes with a round, childish face and a hat came down the corridor pushing a wheelchair in which sat a wrinkled, trembling old woman in a mink coat, holding flowers in both arms, enormous bundles of them. Maybe this was the ninety-nine-year-old sister with her chauffeur, what did I know? I looked after them in horror until they vanished in the private ward. Then I almost ran. I rushed out of the building and through the park, past patients in wheelchairs, past convalescents, past visitors, and only began to calm down in the Kronenhalle. Over the liver dumpling soup.”
30
“I drove straight from the Kronenhalle to Chur. Unfortunately I had to take my wife and daughter along; it was Sunday and I had promised them the afternoon, and I didn’t want to get embroiled in explanations. I didn’t say a word, drove way above the speed limit; maybe something could still be salvaged. But my family didn’t have to wait long in the car outside the gas station. The tavern was positively hopping. Annemarie had just come back from reform school; the place was swarming with some pretty unsavory characters; despite the cold, Matthäi was sitting on his bench in his mechanic’s overalls, smoking a cheroot, stinking of absinthe. I sat down beside him and told him the story in a few words. But it was too late. He didn’t even seem to be listening. For a moment I was decided; then I went back to my Opel Kapitän and drove on to Chur. My family was impatient, they were hungry.
“‘Wasn’t that Matthäi?’ my wife asked; as usual, she had no idea.
“‘Yes.’
“‘I thought he was in Jordan,’ she said.
“‘He didn’t go, dear.’
“In Chur we had trouble parking. The pastry shop was crammed full of people from Zurich and their screaming children, all stuffing their bellies and sweating. But finally we found a table, ordered tea and pastry. But my wife called the waitress back again.
“‘And please bring us half a pound of chocolate truffles.’
“She was only slightly surprised when I didn’t want to eat any truffles. Not for the life of me.
“And now, my dear sir, you can do what you want with this story. Emma, the bill.”
Did you know?
Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt was one of the most highly regarded German-language novelists and dramatists of the twentieth century, and his works have been translated into 49 languages. As a dramatist he wrote plays that reflected the mood of a war-scarred Europe. As a novelist, he is famed for his philosophical crime thrillers, which draw comparisons to the works of Paul Auster and Umberto Eco for their post-modern questioning of the conventions of the genre.
Dürrenmatt thought detective novels should reflect the absurdity of real life rather than proceeding like mathematical equations with a definite solution. Of the traditional crime writers, he once said, “You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy.”
Dürrenmatt’s most famous novel, The Pledge, was initially written as a screenplay titled Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight). The film producers compelled Dürrenmatt to bring this original to a neat conclusion that they felt was more suitable for the screen. The decidedly un-neat conclusion of the subsequent novel, and the subtitle Requiem for the Detective Novel, reflect Dürrenmatt’s deep dislike of such formulaic and predictable plot constructions. Ironically, this book went on to spawn two successful movies, including a 2001 film starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Sean Penn.
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Copyright
Pushkin Vertigo
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Original text © 1986 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
English translation by Joel Agee © 2000
by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
The Pledge was first published by Verlag der Arche as Das Versprechen in Zurich, 1958
First published in English by Jonathan Cape, 1959
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
ISBN 978 1 782273 50 9
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