Dirty Snow

by Georges Simenon

  It was over. Perhaps for a little while—until tomorrow.

  They didn’t nod at each other. No one here ever nodded at anyone. It must have been one of the local customs. It lent the building an impression of emptiness.

  It was very cold outside, much colder than it had been over the last few days. The sky was as bright as polished steel. The crests of the roofs seemed sharper than usual.

  Tomorrow morning there would be frost flowers on the windowpanes.

  4

  IT WAS funny. He had spent the greater part of his life—it wasn’t an exaggeration—hating destiny with an almost personal hatred, to the point of looking for it everywhere, wanting to defy it, to wrestle with it.

  And here, when he wasn’t even thinking about it, destiny gave him a gift.

  There was no other way to put it. Of course the old gentleman, cold-blooded fish that he was, might have had a moment of weakness and felt some pity. Or it could have been a tactical error on his part, but that wasn’t very likely, since he never made mistakes. But probably it had happened on another level entirely, in that very high section to which Holst had addressed his request, and where someone who knew nothing at all about the whole matter had attached a note to the request meaning “yes.”

  Holst was downstairs! Holst was in the little room by the stove, and with him, a little behind him, was Sissy.

  They were both there.

  Frank hadn’t been warned. They had come to collect him as if for further interrogation. In the five days or so since his mother and Minna had been there, he had been interrogated twelve, maybe fifteen times. He was almost at the end of his rope. He was so weak that his mind wandered.

  Holst was there. Frank stopped short and looked at him. He had seen Sissy, too, but he continued to stare at Holst, and his feet wouldn’t stir, his body wouldn’t stir. The marvelous thing was that Holst didn’t even dream of opening his mouth.

  To say what?

  He seemed to understand the question in Frank’s eyes. As though in answer, he pushed Sissy forward a little.

  The old gentleman must have been presiding at his pulpit. The two acolytes were standing at their posts, he was sure of that. There was the stove, the window, the courtyard, the guard near the sentry box.

  In fact, there was nothing at all: just Sissy in a black coat that made her look very thin, wearing a black beret that didn’t completely hide her fair hair. She looked at him. She didn’t want to cry like Lotte. She wasn’t overcome by pity like Minna. Perhaps she didn’t even notice his two missing teeth, his unkempt beard or rumpled clothes.

  She didn’t come any closer. Neither of them dared to come closer. And if they had dared, would they have done it? He wasn’t sure.

  She started to open her mouth. She was about to speak. Finally she said—exactly as he had known she would— “Frank …”

  She wanted to say something else and he was afraid.

  “I came to tell you …”

  He was embarrassed. “I know,” he murmured.

  He thought she was going to say, he was afraid she was going to say: “… I’m not angry with you.” Or perhaps: “… I forgive you.”

  But that wasn’t what she said. She kept looking at him, and it seemed impossible that two people ever looked at each other so intensely ever before. She simply said, “I came to tell you I love you.”

  She was holding her little black bag in her hand. Everything was happening as it had in his dream, except that the old gentleman had just meticulously rolled a cigarette and was licking the paper with the tip of his tongue.

  Frank didn’t answer. He didn’t have the right to. He had nothing to say. He looked over at Holst. Holst wasn’t wearing the gray felt boots he always wore on the streetcar. He had shoes on like everybody else. He was dressed in gray. His cap was in his hand.

  Frank was afraid to stir. He felt his lips move, but he wasn’t trying to speak. He was nervous—maybe, he didn’t know. Then Holst stepped forward, without paying any attention to the old gentleman and the two mustachioed acolytes, and he laid his hand on Frank’s shoulder exactly as Frank had always known a father would.

  Did Holst think that explanations were necessary? Was he afraid Frank hadn’t understood? Did he still have doubts?

  The hand lay on Frank’s shoulder and as Holst began to recite—he really seemed to be reciting, in a voice that was both solemn and without expression; it was reminiscent of certain ceremonies during Holy Week. “I had a son, a boy who was a little older than you. He wanted to be a doctor. Medicine was his passion. Nothing else mattered to him. When I ran out of money, he decided to continue his studies in spite of everything.

  “One day some expensive supplies, mercury, platinum, were found missing from the physics laboratory. Then people began to complain about minor thefts around the university. Finally a student, coming into the cloakroom suddenly, caught my son in the act of stealing a wallet.

  “He was twenty-one. As they were taking him to the rector’s office, he jumped out of a third-story window.”

  Holst gripped his shoulder more tightly.

  Frank would have liked to say something. There was one thing he wanted to say above all, but it meant nothing, and Holst might take it the wrong way: he would have liked to have been Holst’s son. It would have made him so happy—it would have relieved him of such a burden—to say, “Father!”

  Sissy continued to stare at him. He couldn’t say whether, like Minna, she’d gotten thinner and paler. It didn’t matter. She had come. She’d wanted to come and Holst had agreed. Holst had had taken her by the hand and brought her to Frank.

  “You see,” he finished, “it’s not an easy job, being a man.”

  And he seemed to smile a little as he said these words, as if he was sorry.

  “Sissy talks about you to Monsieur Wimmer all day long. I found work in an office, but I get home early.”

  He turned toward the window so they could look at each other, just the two of them.

  There was no ring. There was no key. There were no prayers. Holst’s words had taken their place.

  Sissy was there. Holst was there.

  They mustn’t stay too long. Frank probably wouldn’t be able to stand it. That was all he had and all he wanted. It was his lot. He had nothing before and nothing would exist after.

  This was his wedding, his own wedding. This was his honeymoon, his life—it had to be lived all at once, taken in a single dose, while the old gentleman went on rummaging among his scraps.

  They wouldn’t have a window that opened, laundry to hang out to dry, a cradle.

  If there had been all that, then perhaps there would have been nothing at all—just Frank raging against destiny. It wasn’t whether it lasted that mattered. It just mattered that it was.

  “Sissy …”

  He didn’t know if he had murmured her name or only thought it. His lips moved, but he couldn’t prevent them from moving. His hands moved, too, reaching out, though he stopped them just in time. Sissy’s hands also moved. She controlled them by clutching at her bag with her fingers.

  For her, too, and for Holst, it mustn’t go on.

  “We’ll try to come back,” Holst said.

  Frank smiled, still looking at Sissy. He nodded his head, knowing of course it wasn’t true, just as Holst knew it wasn’t, and as Sissy probably did, too.

  “You’ll come back, yes.”

  That was all. His eyes couldn’t take it anymore. He was afraid he’d faint. He hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before. He’d hardly slept in a week.

  Holst went to his daughter and took her arm. “Be brave, Frank,” he said.

  Sissy said nothing. She let herself be led off, head still turned toward him, eyes fixed on his with an expression that he had never seen in human eyes.

  They hadn’t touched each other, not even their fingers. It hadn’t been necessary.

  They left. He saw them through the window, against the white background of the courtyard, and Si
ssy’s face was still turned toward him.

  Quick! He was going to scream! It was too much! Quick!

  He couldn’t keep still any longer. He walked toward the old gentleman, opened his mouth. He was going to gesture wildly, say something loud and furious, but the sounds wouldn’t emerge. He stood paralyzed.

  She had come. She was there. She was in him. His. Holst had given them his blessing.

  Destiny had given him a gift, and now, by an absurd aberration, with unheard-of generosity, it handed him another. Instead of interrogating him, which was no doubt what was supposed to take place, the old gentleman got up and went to put on his hat—it had never happened before—and Frank was led back to his room.

  He owed it to himself not to sleep on his wedding night, and they didn’t disturb him.

  It was better that he couldn’t feel his exhaustion anymore, that he was so calm when he got up, so sure of everything. He waited for them. He looked at the window across the way, but it hardly mattered if they came before it opened.

  Sissy was in him.

  Civilian in front, soldier behind, he came along, and though they kept him waiting, he didn’t care. It was the last time. It had to be the last. And there must have been a new light in his eyes, because the old gentleman looked up and then paused, taken aback, before studying him uneasily.

  “Sit down.”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t going to be a seated session, he had decided that.

  “First, I should like to ask permission to make an important statement.”

  He would speak slowly. It would give more weight to his words.

  “I stole the watches and I killed Mademoiselle Vilmos, the sister of the watchmaker in my village. I had already killed one of your officers, at the corner of the blind alley that leads to the tannery, in order to take his automatic, because I wanted one. I did things that were much more shameful. I committed the worst crime in the world, but that has nothing to do with you. I am not a fanatic, an agitator, or a patriot. I am a piece of shit. Since you began interrogating me I’ve done everything I could to gain time, because I simply had to have more time. Now it’s over.”

  He spoke without taking a breath, almost as if trying to imitate the old gentleman’s icy voice. At times, though, he sounded more like Holst.

  “I know nothing about whatever it is you’re investigating. That I swear. But if I did know something, I wouldn’t tell. You could interrogate me as long as you wanted, but I wouldn’t tell you a word. You can torture me. I’m not afraid of torture. You can promise me my life. I don’t want it. I want to die, as soon as possible, in whatever fashion you choose.

  “Don’t resent my talking to you like this. I have nothing against you personally. You’ve done your job. As for me, I’ve decided to stop talking, and these are the last words I’ll say to you.”

  They beat him. They brought him down two or three times to beat him. The last time, they stripped him naked in the room. Then the men with mustaches went to work, but without excitement and without animosity. They had been ordered, no doubt, to hit him hard, to knee him in the balls, and he had blushed when for an instant he had thought of Kromer and of Sissy.

  He had nothing to eat but soup. They had taken away the rest.

  It wouldn’t be long now. If they didn’t hurry, it might happen anyway.

  He still hoped they’d take him to the cellar. It was his old obsession with wanting to be treated differently from other people.

  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

  AFTERWORD

  WHAT 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.

  Chekh
ov 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.