There is no connection. He really would like there to be no connection. He prefers to change the course of his thoughts.
And now there is no lack of material. They let him carry his suitcase. Once again, a plainclothes man walks in front of him and the soldier behind him as he is taken back to his classroom; he almost has the illusion he is going to a hotel room. They close the door behind him, and he is alone.
Why have they ordered him to get ready? Because it is an order, there can be no doubt about that. The moment has come. They are going to take him somewhere. Will they make him take his suitcase with him? Will he come back here afterwards? They must have removed the newspaper the objects were wrapped in, and everything is a jumble. There are bars of pink toilet soap that remind him of Bertha’s skin, a smoked sausage, quite a large piece of bacon, a pound of sugar and some bars of chocolate. He also finds half a dozen of his shirts and pairs of socks, as well as a brand new pullover, which his mother must have bought him. Right at the bottom, there is even a thick pair of knitted woollen gloves, the kind he would never have worn outside.
He changes. He has missed the woman at the window. He is thinking too quickly. It doesn’t count. He is being made to hurry, which does nothing to improve his mood. He almost regrets his solitude and his little habits. When he comes back, if he comes back, he will have to make sense of all that’s in his head. He bites into the chocolate, without realizing that he hasn’t done that for nineteen days, and what lingers from Lotte’s visit is a feeling of disappointment.
He doesn’t know how it could have happened, but he is disappointed. He could find no point of contact with her. He asked her questions, and it seemed to him, it still seems to him, that what she replied had no connection with what he asked her.
And yet she did give him news, as quickly and directly as she could. The authorities must have left her alone, if she didn’t yet know where he was the day before. That means his name hasn’t been in the newspapers. The local police aren’t involved in the case. She must have found out from Kurt Hamling.
Hamling is still paying visits, but he has crossed the landing, rather as you might cross a river. Now he is seeing the Holsts. For what purpose? Holst isn’t working on the trams any more. There is a perfectly simple reason for that. On alternate weeks, his job obliged him to come home in the middle of the night, and during his absence Sissy was alone. He must have found another job, one that only occupies him during the day.
Sissy isn’t being left alone any more. He knows enough about how his mother and people of her sort talk about such things. The fact that she mentioned the word depression and seemed a little embarrassed must mean it is more serious than that.
Has Sissy gone mad?
He isn’t afraid of words. He forces himself to say this one out loud:
‘Mad!’
There! With the two men, her father and old Wimmer, taking turns to be with her, and the chief inspector coming from time to time and sitting there without taking off his coat or his galoshes, which leave traces of wetness on the floor.
They are going to take Frank somewhere. Otherwise there would have been no point in telling him to get ready. And now he is ready much too early. He has nothing else to do and there is no point in thinking during this interlude. It wouldn’t lead anywhere, only diminish his faculties a little. After the chocolate, he chews on the sausage. It never occurred to his mother that he has no knife to cut it. And he has no water left to wash his face. Now he smells of smoked meat.
Why don’t they come quickly? Why don’t they take him? And above all why don’t they bring him back as quickly as possible and leave him in peace?
The same plainclothes man as earlier. Basically, apart from the soldiers, who change all the time, there aren’t very many of them. They all look alike. If Timo is right, the sector they belong to must be quite a highly placed one. Didn’t Timo tell him that the man the colonel started shaking in front of looked like a minor civil servant?
Here, they are all like that. You never see any of them looking cheerful, or smartly turned out. You can’t imagine them sitting down to a good meal or with their arms around girls. In appearance, these men are made for stringing figures together.
Since, again according to Timo, the truth is the opposite of appearances as far as they’re concerned, they must be terribly powerful.
The small office again. The old man isn’t there. Maybe he has gone to lunch. Frank sees his tie and shoelaces on the desk. They point at the objects and tell him, in a terrible accent:
‘You can!’
He sits down on a chair. He isn’t at all scared of them. If these people understood his language better, he would start talking to them about something, anything.
There are two of them waiting, with hats on their heads. As they go out, one of them hands him a cigarette, then a match.
‘Thanks.’
A car is parked in the courtyard, not a Black Maria, not a military vehicle, but a shiny black car, the kind that rich people who could afford a chauffeur used to have in the old days. Very smoothly and noiselessly, it drives out through the gate and heads for town, following the tram lines. Even though the windows are shut, the air even has something of the taste of the air outside. There are people on the pavements, shop windows, a little boy pushing half a brick with his foot and hopping.
They didn’t get him to bring his suitcase. Nor did they make him sign any papers. He’ll be back. He’s convinced he’ll be back and again see the woman hanging baby things at her window. Damn, if only he had turned in time, he might have been able to identify the building. He will have to remember when he gets back.
The journey is a lot shorter by car than by tram. They are already nearing the centre of town. They drive around the outside of an imposing building where most of the military offices are. This is where the general must have his office. There are sentries at all the doors, and barriers to stop civilians from passing along the pavement.
They don’t pull up by the monumental front steps, but outside a low door in a sidestreet, where there used to be a police station that has since been moved. He doesn’t need them to motion to him to get out. He has understood. For a moment, a short moment, he stands motionless in the middle of the pavement. He sees people on the other side of the street. He doesn’t recognize anyone. Nobody recognizes him, nobody looks at him. He doesn’t linger. That’s certainly not allowed.
He enters of his own accord. He waits for a second and is then led through a maze of dark, complicated corridors, where there are mysterious inscriptions on the doors and where, from time to time, they pass a secretary carrying files under her arm.
He won’t be tortured in a place like this. There wouldn’t be so many female employees in light-coloured blouses. They don’t even look at him as he passes. There is nothing dramatic here. These are offices, pure and simple, lots and lots of offices piled high with paperwork, where uniformed officers and sergeants work and smoke cigars. The mysterious signs on the doors, letters followed by numbers, clearly indicate different departments.
It is another sector, Timo’s right. You immediately feel the difference. Is it a higher or lower sector? He is not yet capable of saying. Here, for example, you hear raised voices, whispers, laughter. There are well-fed men puffing out their chests and tightening their belts before leaving; you sense the women’s breasts beneath their blouses, the softness of their hips under their skirts. There must be some who make love on the corners of the desks.
Frank himself behaves differently. He looks around him as he would anywhere and he feels a little embarrassed that he has kept his beard. He holds himself almost the way he did before. He tries to see himself in the glass of a door and raises a hand to his tie.
They arrive. It is almost at the top of the building. The rooms have lower ceilings and smaller windows, and the corridors are dusty. He is shown into a first office, where there is nobody, and where the only things to be seen are green filing cabinets the whole length of
the walls and a large white wooden table covered in dirty blotting pads.
Is he wrong? He gets the impression his two companions don’t feel at home, that they have assumed expressions that are both distant and humble, with perhaps a small touch of irony, or scorn. They look at each other questioningly, then one of them knocks at a side-door. The man disappears and returns immediately, followed by a fat officer in an unbuttoned tunic.
From the doorway, the officer looks Frank up and down, puffing at his cigar with a self-important air.
He seems pleased, although at first glance he looked a little surprised to find that Frank is so young.
‘Come here!’
He is simultaneously gruff and good-natured. To bring him in, he puts a hand on his shoulder. The two plain-clothes men don’t follow him into the office. The officer shuts the door. In a corner, near another door, a younger, lower-ranking officer is working by the light of a lamp, that part of the room being dimly lit.
‘Friedmaier, isn’t it?’
‘That’s my name.’
The officer glances at the typewritten sheet of paper which has been made ready. ‘Frank Friedmaier. Very good. Sit down.’
He gestures to a straw-bottomed chair on the other side of his desk and pushes a cigarette box and a lighter towards him. It must be a habit. The cigarettes are there for visitors, because the officer himself is smoking a cigar that’s unusually light and perfumed.
He has sat back in his armchair, belly thrust forwards. He has sparse hair and the complexion of a big eater.
‘So, my friend, what do you have to tell me?’
He may have an accent, but he speaks the language fluently, understands the nuances, and his familiarity is deliberate.
‘I don’t know,’ Frank says.
‘Ha, ha! I don’t know!’
This reply seems to delight him, and he translates it for the other officer.
‘We’ll have to find out, though, won’t we? We’ve given you enough time to think.’
‘To think about what?’
This time, the officer frowns, stands up, walks over to a cabinet, takes out a file and looks through it. All this may be play-acting. He sits down again, resumes his pose and flicks the ash from his cigar with the nail of his little finger. ‘I’m waiting.’
‘All I ask is to answer your questions.’
‘There you are! What questions? I bet you don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know what you’ve done?’
‘I don’t know what I’m being accused of.’
‘There you are! There you are!’
It is like a curious kind of tic. He is constantly saying these words.
‘You’d like to know what it is we want to know. There you are! That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Because maybe you know other things as well?’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘You don’t know anything! Anything at all! But it was in your pockets that we found this, wasn’t it?’
For a moment, Frank has been expecting to see the revolver emerge from the drawer into which the officer has plunged his hand. He has turned pale. He knows they are looking at him. He looks almost regretfully at his interrogator’s hand and is quite surprised to recognize the wad of banknotes he carried around in his pockets and displayed every other minute.
‘There you are! But I don’t suppose this is anything, is it?’
‘It’s money.’
‘It’s money, yes. Lots of money.’
‘I earned it.’
‘There you are, you earned it! When we earn money, there’s always someone, or a bank, that gives it to us. That’s right, isn’t it? Well, the one thing I want to know is who gave you that money. It’s quite simple. Easy, in fact. All you have to do is tell me the name. There you are!’
There is a sudden silence, then, after a good moment, the officer repeats, more ingratiatingly, his cheeks slightly pink:
‘All you have to do is tell me the name.’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘You don’t know who gave you all that money?’
‘I’m sure I got it from several places.’
‘Of course!’
‘I do business.’
‘Of course!’
‘You get money here and there. You exchange notes. You don’t always make a note of—’
But, all of a sudden, the man changes tone.
‘No!’ he says categorically, slamming the drawer shut.
He looks furious, threatening. He walks around the desk, approaches Frank and touches his shoulder again. For a second, Frank thinks he is going to slap him. But instead he forces him to stand, while continuing to talk as if to himself.
‘This is just any old money, is it? Money you get here and there, money you stuff in your pocket without even bothering to look at it!’
‘Yes.’
‘No!’
Frank’s throat feels tight. He doesn’t know where his interrogator is going with this. He feels a vague threat, a mystery. He has been thinking frantically for eighteen days, almost nineteen. He has tried to foresee everything, and nothing is happening the way it ought to happen. All at once, he has been transported to another level. The school and the old man with the glasses suddenly represent an almost reassuring world, and yet he has a cigarette between his lips, he can hear a typewriter clicking in the next room, and women are passing in the corridor.
‘Take a good look at this, Friedmaier, and tell me if this is just any old money.’
He has taken one of the banknotes from the desk. He draws Frank over to the window, one hand still on his shoulder, and holds up the banknote in such a way that you can see through it.
‘Come closer! Don’t be afraid! There’s no need to be afraid.’
Why do these words seem more threatening than the sound of blows he heard the first day in the old man’s office?
‘Have a good look. In the left-hand corner. See the little holes? Six tiny little holes. There you are! And the little holes form a pattern. And there are little holes like these on all the banknotes that were in your pocket and on those you spent.’
He is unable to speak, unable to think. It is as if a hole has opened up in front of him in the place where he least expected it, as if the wall around the window has disappeared, leaving the two men suspended above the street.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh, so you don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘And I don’t suppose you know what these little holes mean either? There you are! You don’t know!’
‘No.’
It’s true. He has never heard of this before. He has the impression that simply knowing the meaning of what the officer calls the little holes must be a more damning charge against him than any crime. He wishes the man would look him in the eyes and see how totally sincere he is.
‘I swear I don’t know.’
‘But I do.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that I know. And that’s why I need to find out where you got those notes.’
‘I told you—’
‘No!’
‘I assure you—’
‘The notes were stolen.’
‘Not by me.’
‘You’re right!’ How can he be so sure? And now he says, hammering out the syllables, ‘They were stolen from here.’ And as Frank looks around him with terror in his eyes, he adds, ‘They were stolen from here, from this building.’
Frank is afraid he is going to faint. From now on, he will understand the words ‘cold sweat’. He understands other things. He thinks he understands it all.
The little holes are made in the banknotes by the occupiers. But in which notes? From which reserve?
Nobody knows, nobody has ever suspected, and it is already terrifying to be in on the secret.
He isn’t the one being accused, damn it! It isn’t Kromer either. They
know perfectly well the two of them are just petty black marketeers and that people like them don’t have access to certain safes.
Do they already suspect the general? Have they arrested Kromer? Have they questioned him? Has he talked?
Frank has been going round and round in circles for eighteen and a half days. But all of that was false, stupid. He has been concerned with people who didn’t matter, people on his level, as if fate would have used such intermediaries.
Fate has chosen a banknote, probably one of the ones he spent, maybe at Timo’s, or at the tailor’s that sold him his camelhair overcoat? Or maybe it was one of the notes he gave Kropetzki for his sister’s eyes?
‘We’ll have to find out, won’t we?’ the officer says, sitting back down and again pushing the cigarette box towards Frank. ‘There you are, Friedmaier! That’s the long and the short of it!’
PART THREE
* * *
The Woman at the Window
1.
He is lying on his stomach, asleep. He is aware that he is asleep. It is something he has learned only recently, along with lots of other things. In the old days, it was only towards morning, especially when the sun had just risen, that he was aware of being asleep. And as it was even stronger when he had been drinking the night before, he sometimes drank to excess and got back late just so that he could savour that kind of sleep.
Not that it was exactly the same as his new sleep. In the old days, he never slept on his stomach. Do all the prisoners here learn to sleep on their stomachs? He has no idea, and he doesn’t care. And yet he would happily employ their complicated system of correspondence if he had the patience or the inclination to study it, in order to tell them, ‘Sleep on your stomachs!’
It wasn’t just about sleeping on your stomach. It was about burrowing, like an animal, like an insect, into the planks that make up the base of his bed. Hard as they are, he has the impression he will leave the imprint of his body on them, like when you sleep on the ground in a field.
He is flat on his stomach, and it hurts. Lots of little bones or muscles hurt, not immediately, and not all together, but in an order he is starting to be familiar with and which he has become capable of orchestrating, like a symphony. There are deep, dark pains and sharp pains, so sharp they make you see bright yellow. Some only last a few seconds, but their intensity makes them voluptuous, and you miss them when they wear off, while others form a background, melt together, harmonize so well that in the end it is impossible to identify the sore spot.
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