The Snow Was Dirty

by Georges Simenon

  Her body was a work of art, but all she had was her body. And even that was somehow lifeless, without vibration. She would place it the way you wanted it, how you wanted it, with the air of saying, ‘Look at it, caress it, do what you have to do, but hurry up about it!’

  It was on the Thursday that Bertha left. On the Friday, at 3.30 in the afternoon, he was in the street when he spotted the tenant from the second floor standing by a shop window. It was only later that it occurred to him that it was a window displaying corsets. At least an hour had gone by. He had gone with a casual acquaintance named Kropetzki to eat cakes at Taste’s. Ressl, the editor, was there. It is the kind of place Ressl feels at home in, the refined setting that suits him, and Frank has rarely seen a woman so sleek and well dressed as the one who was with him.

  Ressl favoured him with a little wave of the hand. Frank and his friend listened to the music, because Taste’s is the only place where, from five in the afternoon, they still play palm court music. That reminded him of the violinist, because there was a tall, thin violinist among the musicians.

  Has he been shot? People always get scared, but most often you see those you thought were dead come back home one fine day. Some claim they have been tortured, but it is rare. Unless the others, those who say nothing, keep silent out of caution?

  The idea of torture chills the blood in his veins, and yet, when it comes down to it, torture wouldn’t scare him. Would he hold out? He is convinced he would. It is something that has often occurred to him, a thought that is familiar. Even before it became part of life. When he was little, he used to have fun hurting himself, in front of the mirror, sticking a pin in his skin, for example, and watching his facial reactions.

  They won’t torture him. They won’t dare. The others also use torture, at least so they say.

  Why would they torture him anyway? He can’t tell them anything.

  In a few days, it’ll be Christmas. A false Christmas, once again. Except when he was a small child, all he has ever known are false Christmases. Sometimes, when he was seven or eight, he came to town at this time of the year, and the streets were more brightly lit than a ballroom; men in thick coats and women in furs thronged the pavements, and the windows were so full of goods that they seemed on the verge of collapsing into the street.

  They’ll put up a little tree in the salon at Lotte’s, like the other years. It’s more for the clients. Who will stay? Minna must have family. Even when the girls don’t bother about them the rest of the year, they remember when it comes to the holidays. As for Anny, they don’t know where she is from. Maybe she’ll stay? Quite likely she’ll be content to stuff herself, then plunge back into her magazines.

  Even Kromer goes home, some thirty kilometres away, for Christmas!

  Sissy will still be in her bed. Holst will spend his last few pennies, if he has any left, or will sell a few books, in order to decorate a tree for her. They will ask old Wimmer to stay – he has found his vocation and has become their maid of all work.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ his friend asks.

  He gives a start. ‘Me?’

  ‘No, the Pope.’

  ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You looked as if you wanted to strangle the musicians.’

  Really? He wasn’t even looking at them. He had forgotten all about them.

  ‘Actually, I’d like to ask you a favour, but I don’t dare.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘It’s not what you think. It isn’t for me. It’s for my sister. She’s been needing an operation for a long time. I was told you have lots of money.’

  ‘What’s the matter with your sister?’

  She hasn’t even worked at Lotte’s, Frank thinks ironically.

  ‘It’s her eyes. If they don’t operate, she’ll go blind.’

  He is the same age as Frank, but weak, timid, born to be squashed. Tears have immediately welled in his eyes.

  ‘How much does she need?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but I think if you could lend me—’

  Frank flourishes the wad of banknotes like a conjurer. It has become a game. ‘If you say thank you, you’re even more stupid than I thought.’

  ‘Frank, my friend—’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Let’s get out of here!’

  Is it a coincidence that the man from the second floor is a little way along the street, still standing in front of a shop window, but this time a window full of dolls? He has a little girl. Christmas is coming. He could argue that it is quite natural for him to be looking at the window displays.

  What if Frank went up to him and asked him straight out what he wants, if necessary waving his green card or his revolver at him?

  The fact is, what Timo told him has made an impression on him. He continues on his way, then turns. The man isn’t following him. There is only Kropetzki sticking to his heels, and he has a lot of difficulty getting rid of him.

  If fate is lying in wait for him, it won’t show itself tonight, since he is able to have dinner, meet Kromer – preoccupied and a bit distant – drink in three different clubs and argue with a stranger at a bar for a long time without anything happening.

  From Timo’s to home, passing the alley by the tannery, nothing happens either. It would be funny if fate chose that very spot to be lying in ambush! It is the kind of thing you think about at three in the morning, when you’ve drunk a lot.

  There is light in the Holsts’ apartment. Maybe it is the hour for the compresses, or the drops, or God knows what other kind of treatment? He listens at the door. They must have heard his footsteps. Holst knows he is on the landing, and Frank deliberately stands there for a while, sticking his ear against the wood.

  Holst doesn’t open, doesn’t react.

  Idiot!

  There is nothing for it now but to go to bed and, if he wasn’t so tired, he would make love with Anny, just to upset her. As for Minna, she disgusts him. She is stupidly in love. She probably cries when she thinks about him. Maybe she prays. And she is ashamed of her insides!

  He goes to bed alone. There is still a bit of fire in the stove, and he stares for quite a long time at the pink disc through which the poker is pushed.

  Idiot!

  And it’s in the morning, when he is once again hung over, that it happens. He has been looking for fate everywhere, and it hasn’t been in any of the places he figured it might be.

  More chance: there is nothing left to drink in the house, the two decanters are empty; Lotte should have told him days ago that they need to stock up, but she forgot.

  He will have to go to Timo’s. For those things, it is best to see him in the morning. Timo doesn’t like selling, even at a high price. He claims you always lose on it, that good bottles are worth more than lousy money.

  Frank is thirsty. Lotte’s hair is in curlers. She has put on a loose light-coloured blouse to do the housework with Minna. Anny doesn’t react when they sweep between her legs. There she is, impassive as a goddess, engrossed, not in daydreaming or contemplation, but in reading her magazine. She lets ash fall from her cigarette on to the floor.

  ‘Don’t buy too much in one go, Frank.’

  It’s strange. He was on the point of leaving his revolver in the apartment, not because of what Timo said, but because it seemed to him like cheating.

  He doesn’t want to cheat.

  He met Mr Wimmer climbing the stairs with provisions, a string bag in which there was a cabbage and some swedes, and Mr Wimmer didn’t react, passing very close to him without saying a word.

  Idiot!

  He remembers that he stopped on the second-floor landing to light his first cigarette – it has a nasty taste, like always when he has drunk too much the previous night – and that he looked mechanically into the left-hand corridor. He saw nothing. The corridor is empty, with a child’s pram right at the end. A baby can be heard crying.

  He gets to the ground floor and is about to pass the caretaker’s lodge. Just
then, the door opens.

  He has never thought it could happen like this. To tell the truth, he doesn’t even realize something is happening.

  The caretaker looks the same as usual, with his cap on his head. Next to him is a nondescript man who looks vaguely like a foreigner and who is wearing an overcoat that is too long for him.

  Just as Frank passes, the foreigner touches the brim of his hat, as if to thank the caretaker, follows Frank out and catches up with him before he has reached the middle of the pavement.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind following me.’

  As simple as that. He has shown him an object in the hollow of his hand, a card protected by cellophane, with a photograph and some stamps. What kind of card? Frank has no idea.

  ‘All right,’ Frank says, very calmly if a little stiffly.

  ‘Give me that.’

  He doesn’t have time to wonder what he is supposed to give: the man has immediately plunged his hand into Frank’s right-hand pocket and grabbed hold of the revolver, which he slips into his own overcoat.

  If anyone is watching them right now – Frank has no idea if there is – they probably wouldn’t understand.

  And there is no car waiting at the kerb. They walk side by side to the tram stop. They wait for the tram, like anybody else, without even looking at each other.

  4.

  It’s the eighteenth day. He’s holding out. He will hold out. He’s discovered that it’s all a matter of holding out, and that if he does he’ll get one over on them. Is it really about getting one over on them? That’s another problem, one that he will solve when the time comes. He has done a lot of thinking. Too much. Thinking can be dangerous, too. You have to be very strict with yourself. Thinking that he’ll get one over on them simply means that he will get out of this. And the expression ‘get out of this’ doesn’t just refer to the place where he is.

  It’s amazing the way people outside use words without thinking about their real meaning. He may not be very educated, but there are lots like him, they are in the majority, and he realizes now that he has always been content to use words approximately.

  This question of the meaning of words took him two days. He might come back to it.

  Anyway, it’s the eighteenth day, and that’s something he’s absolutely certain of. He’s made sure it’s something he’s absolutely certain of. He’s chosen an almost empty portion of wall and every morning he draws a line with his thumbnail. It’s more difficult than you might think. Not drawing the line, even though his nail is already quite worn down. But drawing only one. Making sure you have drawn it. The wall is covered in plaster, which makes it easier. What wasn’t easy was finding a clean spot, because of all the others who have been here before him.

  Nor – and this is another of his discoveries – must you start having qualms, questioning everything, because here there is a tendency to doubt, and he has realized that once you start doubting, you’re lost.

  He will get to the bottom of the problem all by himself, provided he is disciplined, provided he doesn’t allow himself to start daydreaming. You have to become strict about certain things. For example, the last morning he spent outside, he didn’t know the date. He knew it without knowing it. He isn’t sure of it. So that, even if he can guarantee that he has been here for eighteen days, he wouldn’t dare swear, within a day or two, to the date he arrived.

  This is how you live.

  More than likely it is the seventh of January. Although it could be the eighth. As far as what came before is concerned, he lacks indisputable points of reference; but here, he is prepared to swear by his lines.

  If he holds out, if he doesn’t let himself go, if he concentrates sufficiently – though without concentrating too much – it won’t take him long to understand, and it will all be over.

  That reminds him of a dream he has had several times. There are several of those, but the most obvious is the one about flight. He rises off the ground. Not in the open air, in a garden or a street, but always in a room, and in the presence of witnesses who can’t fly. He says to them something like, ‘Look how easy it is!’ then puts his two hands flat down on the empty air and presses. The take-off is slow and painful. He has to make a real effort of will. Once he is in the air, all he has to do is make slight movements, now with his hands, now with his feet. His head brushes the ceiling. He never understands why the others are so astonished. He smiles at them condescendingly.

  ‘It’s easy, I tell you! You just have to want it!’

  Well, here, it’s the same. If he wants it strongly enough, he will understand. He has been placed in a difficult position. He realized from the start that you have to be careful of discrepancies.

  Just one small example: his arrival . . . It was his last hours, his last minutes outside. Or before. He uses the two words indiscriminately. He ought to have an almost mathematically precise memory of those moments. And he has. He guards it preciously. But it takes constant effort. Every day, there is a risk he will change some details, as indeed he is tempted to do, and he has to force himself to go over the events one by one, to link each image to the next.

  For example, it is untrue that Kamp came and stood in the doorway of his little café, or that there was laughter from inside. He was about to add that. He almost believed it. But the truth is, he didn’t see anybody, anybody at all, before the tram, swaying as usual, came to a halt in front of them. They didn’t look at each other to know if they should get on at the front or at the back. It was as if the man was familiar with Frank’s habits and wanted to please him, so they got on at the front.

  Frank was smoking his cigarette, and the other man had almost a quarter of a cigar in his mouth. He could have thrown it away: he might have wanted to sit inside. Frank, though, except when he was little and he was made to, has never sat inside a tram. For no particular reason, it makes him nervous.

  The man remained on the platform.

  That particular tram, after crossing the bridge, goes through almost the whole of the upper town and ends its journey in a neighbourhood of workers’ apartment houses, almost in the countryside. But although they passed close to the military offices, the man didn’t get off. It wasn’t until three streets further on that he motioned to Frank, and they went and waited for another tram under a yellow disc.

  The sky was bright. That morning it felt as if every window, every white roof, every stretch of snow was glittering. Is his memory distorted? There is one detail that’s undeniable. As they waited for the second tram, he dropped his cigarette end in the snow. Usually, the snow is hard, and covered with a crust. The tobacco should have continued burning itself down for a while. But in fact the cigarette went out, as if sucked in by the dampness of the snow in the sun. Less strictly, he would say that it made a splash as it sank into the snow.

  These are the kinds of details he pays attention to, because they are points of reference. Without them, you would end up thinking all kinds of things and believing them.

  The second tram they took followed a kind of circular boulevard that goes through neighbourhoods that are no longer quite the town without yet being suburbs. Several times, women carrying string shopping bags got on for a short ride; Frank even helped some of them on, and the man didn’t reprimand him.

  There was even a moment when he wondered if this was some kind of practical joke. Was it Kromer? Or Timo? Was Chief Inspector Kurt Hamling getting his own back?

  He was right not to let anything show. He is pleased with himself in general, even now when he has had time to go over every detail with a fine-tooth comb. Others would no doubt have asked questions, or become indignant, or made vulgar jokes. Simply, in a dignified manner, he based his behaviour on that of the man, who must be some kind of low-ranking employee, a mere inspector, without any special instructions regarding him.

  They must have told him, ‘Bring in this young man,’ and added, ‘Be careful, he’s armed!’

  It was out of habit that he immediately knew in which po
cket Frank kept his revolver. The thing that Frank is even prouder of, as far as his own attitude is concerned, is that he didn’t start nervously smoking cigarette after cigarette. When he threw one away, he would say to himself mentally, ‘Two more stops before I have another one.’

  They got off in a very bright neighbourhood, a new neighbourhood, which people in the town barely know, where the bricks are still pink, the paint fresh, and where, just opposite the tram stop, there were spacious buildings beyond a courtyard, with high railings.

  It’s a school. Most likely a high school. There is a sentry box with a guard at the gate, but there is nothing sinister about the place; just opposite, Frank noticed a little café, similar to Mr Kamp’s, but newer.

  ‘We may have to wait a while. We’re early.’

  Apart from the phrases he addressed to him when he came up to him in the street, these are the first words the man has uttered. He does so with a concerned air, as if afraid of being in the wrong. It occurs to Frank that, the other days, he didn’t go out so early and the only reason he did so this morning was because there was nothing more to drink in the apartment.

  Does Lotte already know? Or Holst? Or Sissy?

  He is calm. He has been calm all the time. With all the thinking he has subsequently done about the way he acted, he is pleased with himself. There is nothing upsetting about entering the courtyard of a school, even when there is a sentry box with a guard on duty at the gate.

  They turned right and climbed a few steps, the man walking in front of him, until they got to a glass door, which he opened to let Frank pass.

  It is hard to say what this particular little building was before. Maybe the caretaker’s lodge? There is a bench, and the room is divided in two by a desk that looks like a counter. The woodwork and the furniture are painted light grey. The man walks into an adjoining room, where he says a few words, then comes back and sits down next to Frank.