Was it at that moment he realized that, whatever happened now, he was done for, but that it didn’t matter? If it was, it was only a brief impression. The real discovery is one he has come to patiently, lying here in his corner, on his stomach.
It makes no difference.
He hadn’t thought they conducted that kind of operation in the offices. He wasn’t far wrong. After delivering the blow, the officer seemed embarrassed and said a few words to his lower-ranking colleague who was working under the lamp. Probably something like, ‘You deal with him.’
He had committed an error, hitting him with the brass ruler. Frank knows that now. It shouldn’t have happened in that building. Maybe the officer has since been punished for it, or transferred?
The sectors, as Timo says.
The officer by the lamp, who was tall and thin and still young, sighed as if it wasn’t the first time the other man had let himself be driven to an act of that kind, then opened a door from which hung an enamel fountain and a towel.
Bones had cracked, or cartilage, Frank was sure of it. He didn’t know which. When he opened his mouth, he spat out two teeth and discharged a stream of blood.
‘Keep calm. It’s nothing.’ This second officer also seemed embarrassed. ‘When it bleeds, it’s nothing,’ he said, searching for the words.
All the same, he was annoyed by this blood flowing on to the wooden floor, annoyed by the fact that his chief put his cap on with a swagger and left the office. He seemed to be implying, ‘He’ll never change!’
The eye hadn’t come out of its socket, but it had that effect on Frank. He could have passed out. That would have been easy. It was rather what the officer feared. But Frank wanted to stay hard.
‘It’ll be nothing. A cut. You got him worked up. That wasn’t a good idea!’
Was the thin officer superior to the other? Was it a game to make him talk in spite of everything? This officer was tall and horselike, slow and gentle in his movements. What concerned him was that the blood wouldn’t stop flowing, that it streamed from Frank’s nose, mouth and cheek.
In the end, in desperation, he resigned himself to calling the two plainclothes men who were waiting in the next room. They looked at each other, then one of them went downstairs.
The matter was quickly sorted. The man who had gone downstairs reappeared. Frank’s face was wrapped in a kind of big dark bandage. Together, each holding him by one arm, they took him down to the courtyard, where the car, which they had left outside, had come to wait for them.
Were these gentlemen angry with each other? Is there a genuine rivalry between them? The car set off. Frank was fine, with nothing but the sensation that his head was softly emptying. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. He remembered that he had to try to spot the building of which he only knew one window, but at the last moment he didn’t have the strength to open his eyes.
He was still bleeding. It was disgusting. There was blood everywhere. He barely had time to glimpse the old man, who gave his orders in a few words. The old man wasn’t pleased either.
Thus it was that Frank discovered the infirmary, just beneath the iron staircase, which he had never noticed before. It is another classroom, but it has been converted, and lacquered furniture has been installed, along with lots of instruments.
Is the man who treated him a doctor? The fact is, he looked at the wound with contempt, like the old man with glasses. Not contempt for the wound, but for the man who caused it. He seemed to be thinking: that one again!
And ‘that one’ wasn’t Frank. It was the officer.
He was treated. They knocked out a third tooth that was loose. Now he is missing three teeth, two right at the front, the other towards the back. From time to time, when he goes outside, it still gives him pleasant shooting pains.
He hasn’t been taken back there. Is it because of the way the officer with the cigar reacted? Surely not. He remembers the blows he heard here on the morning of his arrival.
It is all a matter of tactics. For many things, broadly speaking, Timo is right. Timo doesn’t know everything, but he has an overall idea that is fairly accurate.
Here, he has been treated. They have taken him down to the infirmary several times. That is the most painful part, because it almost always happens at the time when the window is open.
Is that why he has recovered so quickly?
He has thought about that. The day after his return from the town, he deliberately didn’t mark the day with a line carved in the plaster on the wall. Nor did he do so for the next five or six days. Then he tried to erase his old marks.
They embarrass him now. They bear witness to a time that has passed. He didn’t yet know, in those days. He thought that life was outside. He thought about the time he would go back there.
It’s curious! It was when he was meticulously carving a line in the plaster every day that he was desperate.
But not any more. Now he has learned how to sleep. He has learned how to lie flat on his stomach on the planks of his bed and sniff his own smell in the sleeves of his jacket.
What he has also learned, the most important thing of all, is that you have to hold out as long as possible and that it depends only on him. He is holding out. He’s holding out so well, he’s so proud of it, that if he could communicate with the outside world, he would write a manual on how to hold out.
What matters above all is to make your own corner, to sink deep into your corner. Does that mean anything to people who can still walk the streets?
His fear, for ten days at least, was that he would be called downstairs and confronted with Lotte. She mentioned that she was hoping to visit him again. They can’t have given her authorization, because they didn’t want her to see Frank in the state he is in now. Are they waiting for his face to become more or less normal again?
He’s fine with that. Lotte did come, or rather, she came to one of their offices, she has been making an effort, he knows she has, because he has received two parcels from her, with sausage, bacon, chocolate, soap and underwear, just like the first time.
What else did he hope to find in the parcels, to search them as he did?
Every evening, in the room above the gymnasium, a blind is lowered, the light comes on, and there is nothing more than a gilded rectangle.
Is the man there at that point? Is there really a man? There probably is one, because of the child, but he might just as easily be a prisoner, or living abroad.
If he does come home, how, coming from outside, does he manage to absorb, all in one go, the apartment, the room, the peaceful warmth, the woman, the baby in its cradle? And the kitchen smells, and his slippers waiting for him!
In spite of everything, Lotte will have to come. He will do what he has to for that. He will behave himself for a while. He will appear to cut them some slack.
He knows them now. They find out everything they want to know in the end. Not those in the big building in town, where the officers smoke cigars and offer you cigarettes before hitting you with a brass ruler like hysterical women! Frank has concluded that they don’t count.
The real ones are the ones like the old man with the glasses.
With him, it is another kind of struggle. At the end of it, whatever happens, whatever the incidents of the game, it will be all up for Frank. The old man will win. He can’t do otherwise. The only thing that can be done is to stop him winning too soon. There is a way, with a lot of effort and a lot of self-control, to gain time.
He doesn’t beat Frank. Nor does he have Frank beaten. Frank is willing to assert, after two weeks of personal experience, that the reason they did beat someone here on the day he arrived was because that person deserved it.
He doesn’t beat Frank and he isn’t sparing of his time. He never gets impatient. He appears not to know about the general or the banknotes – he has never mentioned them, even in passing.
Is it really another sector? Are there airtight walls between the sectors? Some kind of rivalry, or worse? Whatever
the case, the old man looked at the scar – still looks at it every day – with an expression of dismay.
His contempt is not directed at Frank, but at the officer with the blond cigar. He doesn’t say anything about him, pretends not to know that he exists. He never utters a word unconnected with his interrogation, which, however disordered it might appear, and however tortuous, nevertheless follows an extremely direct path.
Here, he isn’t offered cigarettes. He isn’t called Friedmaier, and they don’t tap him on the shoulder, they don’t bother to put on a friendly air.
It’s another world. At school, Frank never understood anything about mathematics, and even the word always struck him as mysterious.
Well, what they are doing here is mathematics. It is a world without barriers, lit by a cold light, in which it isn’t men who move about, but entities, names, numbers, signs, which change place and value every day.
The word ‘mathematics’ still isn’t exact. What do you call the space where the stars move?
He can’t find the word. There are moments when he’s so tired! Not to mention that these details no longer matter. What does matter is that he should be understood, that he should understand himself.
For quite a while, Kromer seemed to be a star of the first magnitude. What Frank calls ‘quite a while’ lasted two interrogations. And in no way, either in pace or duration, do these interrogations resemble the methods of that officer.
But now, Kromer is almost forgotten, he wanders up there among the anonymous stars, from which he is plucked casually every now and again, for one or two questions, before being rejected.
They follow a different logic. The officer was only concerned with the banknotes, and probably the general, while the old man, to all appearances, doesn’t give a damn about any of that, even if he knows about it.
It comes to the same thing in the end. A man who knows what he knows doesn’t get released.
As far as the officer is concerned, he is already dead.
He hit him across the face, and Frank didn’t talk.
Dead!
But the old man then appears, sniffs and decides, ‘Not as dead as all that!’
Because a dead man, or someone who is three-quarters dead, can still have something wormed out of him. And the old man’s job is to worm things out of people.
The banknotes and the general don’t really matter, as long as there is something.
And there has to be something, or Frank wouldn’t be here.
If it wasn’t Frank, it would be someone else, but there would always be something.
What matters, in order to stand up to the old man, is to sleep. The old man himself doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t need sleep. Maybe he dozes off from time to time, but he must be able to set himself like an alarm-clock and be just as fresh, as cold, as clear-headed every day, at the hours he has fixed for himself.
He is a fish, a man with the blood of a fish. Fish have cold blood. It is unlikely he sniffs the sweat in his armpits or watches out for a figure no bigger than a doll at a distant window.
The old man will win. The game is fixed. He holds all the cards and he can even allow himself to cheat. For Frank, winning hasn’t been on the agenda for a long time.
Would he still like to win if it were possible?
It is by no means certain. Most likely not. What matters is to last out, to last for a long time, to see that window again every morning, the woman leaning out, the baby clothes drying in the sun on a line stretched above the void.
What matters every day is to gain another day.
And that’s why it would be ridiculous to carve lines in the plaster of the wall that no longer have any meaning.
It is all a matter of not giving in, not on principle, not to save anything, not as a point of honour, but because one day, without yet knowing why, he decided not to give in.
Does the old man only sleep with one eye open, like him?
It must be a fish’s eye in his case, quite round, lidless and fixed, while Frank deliberately, voluptuously, digs his belly into the earth as if into a woman.
2.
He doesn’t resent them. It’s their job to try, by every means possible, to wear down his resistance. They think they can get to him through sleep. They see to it that he never gets to sleep several hours in a row, and they haven’t guessed – they mustn’t be allowed to guess – that he has learned how to sleep; that it is they, when all is said and done, who taught it to him.
Since the window opposite is closed, he knows they will be calling him soon. It never happens at the same time two days running. That’s another of their little tricks. It would be too easy otherwise. For the afternoon sessions, and especially the night sessions, the times vary considerably. For the morning sessions, the variations are less extreme. The prisoners next door come back from their exercise. They must hate him, consider him a traitor. Not only does he not listen to their messages and not reply, he doesn’t pass them on. That’s another thing he’s understood. The messages are transmitted from classroom to classroom, from wall to wall, even if you don’t understand them, because there is a chance they will reach someone to whom they mean something.
It isn’t his fault. He doesn’t have the time. He doesn’t have the inclination either. It strikes him as silly. These people are concerned with the outside world, with their lives, with childish things. They are wrong to resent him. He knows he is playing a much more important game than they are, a game he has to win. It would be terrible to go without seeing it through to the end and winning.
He is asleep. He goes to sleep as soon as the window has closed. He plunges as deep as he can into sleep, in order to recover. He hears footsteps in the next classroom and moans from the room on the left, where someone, probably an old man or a very young one, spends his time groaning.
As always, almost always, they are going to come before the soup. Frank still has a little bacon and a piece of sausage left. In fact, he wonders why they gave him those two parcels, because without them he would be even weaker.
He is almost willing to grant that the old man shows a certain honesty in the methods he employs, a sense of fair play. Maybe, in his case, he just likes to make things a bit more difficult for himself? Maybe, given Frank’s age – he must think of him as a boy – he is determined, in order not to feel ashamed of his own victory, to give him an extra chance?
As far as the soup goes, anyway, they do it again today. It doesn’t really matter what day it is, since he no longer counts in days, or in weeks. He has other points of reference. He counts according to the main subject of the interrogations, insofar as you can talk about the main subject with a man who likes to mix everything up.
It’s the day after Bertha, four days after the big spring clean in the room with the open window. That is enough.
He was expecting it, in fact. He has recognized a kind of rhythm, like the ebb and flow of the tides. One day, he is called very early; another day, quite late; sometimes, just a few moments before the soup is distributed, when the clatter of the containers can already be heard on the stairs.
He shouldn’t, at the beginning, have consumed it to the last drop. It isn’t good. It’s just hot water, with swedes and sometimes two or three beans. All the same, there are sometimes globules on it, like on dishwater, and then you might be lucky enough to find a very small scrap of greyish meat at the bottom.
It shouldn’t interest him, since he has sausage and bacon. But he likes to sit down on the edge of his bed, with his dish between his knees, and feel the warmth descend from his throat into his stomach.
The old man, who is never seen in the courtyard, let alone on the walkways, must have guessed that, because he has had him brought down before the soup.
Frank recognized the footsteps through his sleep; two sets of footsteps: the plainclothes man in normal shoes and the soldier in boots. It’s for him. Those two are invariably for him. As if he is the only prisoner to be interrogated. He doesn’t lose an iota of
sleep. He waits for the door to open. Even then, he pretends to snore, in order to gain a few more seconds. They have to touch his shoulder. It has become a game, although they probably don’t realize it.
He hardly ever washes any more, again in order to gain time. All the time he has at his disposal is devoted to sleep. And what he means now by sleep is infinitely more important than other people’s sleep. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth the effort of scraping together the smallest crumbs of time the way he does.
He doesn’t smile at them. They don’t say hello. Everything happens without a word, in a state of grim indifference. He takes off his coat and puts on his jacket. Downstairs, it is very hot. In the early days, he suffered, because he kept his coat on. It is better to risk catching cold on the walkway or on the stairs. His own heat doesn’t have time to disperse on such a short journey.
He doesn’t have a mirror, but he senses that he has red eyes, like those who don’t sleep enough. They are hot, and they sting. His skin is too taut, too sensitive.
He walks behind the plainclothes man and in front of the soldier, and during that time he continues to sleep. He is still asleep when they enter the little building, where he is sometimes left to wait for a long time – an hour? – in the first room, on the bench, even though there is nobody with the old man.
He continues to catch up. It’s a matter of habit. There are noises, voices every now and again and, at irregular intervals, the clatter of the tram in the street. He even hears the cries of children, probably coming out of a nearby school.
The children have a teacher. When you are at school, at least one of your teachers always plays the role of the old man for you. For most grown-ups, there is the boss, the head of the office or the workshop, the owner.
Everybody has his old man. He has understood that, and that’s why he doesn’t resent him. Pages are being turned next door, papers are being leafed through. Then a plainclothes man appears in the doorway and motions to him, just like at the doctor’s or the dentist’s, and he stands.
The Snow Was Dirty Page 18