The Dark Meadow (5 page)

‘I've already told you to leave me alone.'

He tries to kiss her, and she turns her head aside.

With his mouth close to her ear, very quietly, almost inaudibly, he says, ‘Hey, a wildcat like you needs a man clever enough to let her have her way. And that's me, never you fear. You're not likely to get anyone else, you know.'

Then he lets go of her.

Albert has started crying again, runs to his mother and clutches her apron, but she doesn't move from the spot. ‘What do you mean?'

Hetsch stands there grinning at her. ‘What do you think I mean? I mean you can think yourself lucky if I take you, because no one else will, not with your brat by the Frenchman. Who knows how many others you've had? No one knows, not with a waitress in a bar.'

This time it is Afra who goes up to him and stands with her face close to his.

‘You get out of here this minute. Go away.'

At that moment they both hear a loud noise. With presence of mind, Afra says, ‘That's my mother up in the bedroom under the attic, so be off with you, because she'll hear me if I call for her.'

She tries not to let her fear or the fact that she is lying show.

He thinks of saying something to her, glares at her briefly, but then goes to the door without a word. Then he turns to her once more.

‘You know something, Afra? I'll get you in the end. You'll have no other option. Poor folk like your family are starvelings, and your father's getting odder all the time. You can throw me out now, but I tell you one thing: I'll be back. And then I'll show you what a real man's like. You'll be grateful when I do come back.'

Afra stands there rubbing her forearm. She is trembling all over.

‘Not for the world, Hetsch, not for the world!'

‘We'll see about that. You won't get rid of me so easily. I always get what I want.'

And with these words he goes out.

Afra stands in the kitchen a little longer, waiting to be sure he is out of the house, and only then does she go over to the bedroom to see what made the noise. The window of the bedroom is wide open. The wind must
have blown it open, and the window frame must have hit the wardrobe and made the noise. The little earthenware vase that was standing on the far corner of the windowsill has fallen to the floor and broken into many fragments. Afra goes over to the window and bolts it shut. Albert has run after her. He is picking up the bits of the vase, curious about them.

‘No, Albert, you'll hurt yourself. I'll sweep it all up later.'

She takes his hand and goes out of the house. There's no one in sight. She is still upset and trembling all over. She breathes deeply, tries to concentrate on the work she must do next. She takes the basket off the bench and goes back into the kitchen. It's time to make her father's mid-morning snack. Albert is crawling over the kitchen floor, playing with a piece of wood and chattering to himself as if nothing had happened. She bends down to him, takes the piece of wood away, and puts a crust of stale bread into his hand instead.

‘There's a bit of bread, or you'll be eating that stick.'

She strokes his head and kisses his forehead.

‘You get everywhere, you do; there's no taking my eyes off you for a minute.'

Tired, ponderous, she straightens up and goes out to the pantry. Dark clouds have come up outside. Afra looks
through the window at the washing hanging on the line. She will have to bring it in before the storm breaks. At that same moment, a gust of wind blows the pantry window open just a crack.

Whenever she thought of that day again later it all came straight back, the uneasy feeling that came over her when she set out on her bicycle in the morning to do her errands. It wasn't as if she had any real reason to feel uneasy. Afra had been wringing out the washing in the open air, and the little boy had still been sleeping peacefully in his bed. Johann had gone out to mow the meadow beside the railway embankment. Theres wanted to hurry and be back home as soon as possible, so that Afra and her father wouldn't start quarrelling again. Over the last few weeks not a day had passed without an argument between the two of them. Sometimes it was about the child – too noisy, too spoilt. Or then again it might be Afra's refusal to go to church. From month to
month the trouble between father and daughter had been getting steadily worse.

But then she had been held up; her last customer, the miller's wife, hadn't been able to make up her mind, and so in the end she cycled away from Einhausen much too late. Even from a distance she saw the washing still hanging on the line in the yard, and she knew that her presentiment had been correct.

The policeman who came out of the house and walked towards her didn't have to explain. She knew that something terrible had happened, although at that moment it wasn't clear to her that the Lord God had taken all she had away from her. She had sat down on the bench and waited. The doctor came first, and then the police officers from town. At some point the priest was there, and they had accompanied her to the priest's house. When she thought about it now it was all so blurred, so unreal. She stayed there in the presbytery for the first few days until she was better and could go home.

When she spoke to Johann for the first time since his arrest, he swore to her that he hadn't done it, and she believed him.

It was in the following weeks that rumours began going around, saying that Johann had killed Afra because he had thought she was possessed by the devil. Or that the
Frenchman, the child's father, had turned up, and since Afra wouldn't let him take the little boy away he had killed them both. Every day, it seemed to Theres, a new rumour emerged. She was at a loss, and when in the end she just didn't know what to do, she went to the police. She said it couldn't have been Johann, because he had sworn to her on all that was sacred to him that he hadn't done it. The officers were friendly but firm. They told Theres she would have to reconcile herself to the fact, hard as it was for her, that her daughter and her grandson had both been killed by her husband, and he had confessed to the crime several times to the investigating officer. If he was denying it to her, his wife, it was only because he had not entirely lost all sense of shame and couldn't bring himself to tell her the truth.

*

Then Theres went home, lay down in bed, and after she had cried all night she began rearranging her life. It wasn't for the first time. She had had to cope with the child Afra on her own after Johann was taken away that time in the past and placed in protective custody. She had learnt to live with the way, when he was released, he screamed in his sleep almost every night. When she couldn't bear it anymore she used to get up and go into the kitchen, where she would sit on the bench next to the crucifix and look out
at the dark. Until she was finally so tired that she couldn't keep her eyes open any longer. Sometimes she still had the strength to go back to bed, but usually she slept sitting at the kitchen table.

When Albert was born, and Johann didn't want to live with the shame of it, she had been the one who held the family together. He still had his God, he wanted to force everyone to stay on the straight and narrow path, and was he supposed to have killed the two of them? He had been stubborn and strange these last few months. He had no patience with the child, and he saw only the worst in Afra, yet she found it hard to believe what people told her.

Every morning she got up, tidied the house, went to the graveyard, put flowers on the grave, and on Sunday she went to Mass. Once a month she made the long journey to see Johann in prison.

And she told anyone who asked to her face that it couldn't have been Johann, because he had sworn to her that it wasn't, by God and all that was sacred to him, and she believed him.

When the doctor drove up in his car the old woman was hunched on the bench beside the house. The police officer who had stayed behind with her husband had told her that she couldn't go in until his colleague was back with the murder squad. The doctor spoke to her kindly, felt her pulse and gave her an injection, and then told her to wait there, he would send a message to her neighbours and they would look after her. She couldn't go into the house until the investigating team had done their work, and that would be best for her at the moment anyway. She should think of staying with friends or relations for now, he said, at least until everything was cleared up. She sat there, looked at him and nodded.

Then he went into the kitchen. The policeman and Johann Zauner were sitting at the table. The policeman jumped up when the doctor came in and said good afternoon, but the old man sat where he was, never moving from the spot.

The next thing he noticed was the remains of a mid-morning snack still on the table. A glass of water, half full, a piece of bread with a bite taken out of it, some smoked meat and cheese. The knife lay beside the plate. Later he would point this, in particular, out to the public prosecutor's office. He was to say:

‘Johann Zauner was sitting beside the two bodies lying on the floor, not moving. He had made himself a snack in the middle of all that chaos, he wasn't letting anything spoil his appetite even though his grandson was lying there in his own blood, dying. He didn't care at all about the boy. Or about his daughter lying on the sofa with her skull smashed in.'

He would go on to say, in his evidence, ‘Although Johann Zauner is a devout Catholic and a member of the Third Order of St Francis, he is a cold, unemotional man, for how else could he sit beside the dead bodies eating?'

*

The doctor had only just arrived when the murder squad's vehicles also arrived outside the house. One of the police
officers told Zauner to get dressed so that he could go to the police station with them. But when he made no move to do as he was told, they took him away just as he was. They led him to the car standing outside the house.

From the evidence of the former member of the police force Josef Weinzierl, eighteen years after the events concerned


I'd joined the police back then, but I soon realized it wasn't the job for me. So when my father died suddenly of blood poisoning, and my elder brother never came home from prison camp in Russia, I chucked it all in and took over the butcher's shop my father used to keep.


I was there when the daughter and grandson of Zauner the cottager were found dead.


And I was the one left alone for quite a while with the old man out there.


I did look more closely at the young woman's body when Irgang had left. I was young at the time, and inquisitive, the way you
are at that age. I wasn't scared, and the sight didn't give me the creeps. If a person's dead then they're dead. Nothing to be done about it.


I must say she was a good-looking girl, that Afra. Had a lovely face and thick dark hair, very striking. She sent the lads crazy. And you may well think that didn't suit the bigoted old man. One bastard in the family was enough for him. The way she lay there you could almost have thought she was asleep. Only you didn't want to look at her hands, they were all scratched. She must have defended herself with all her might. Her fingernails were bloody, and some of them broken off, and she had a deep cut between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand.


And the kitchen was in a right mess! Broken china all over the floor. There was a little hoe lying half under the sofa, like someone had tried to push it right under with his foot.


I told Zauner to stay put on his chair, but I didn't need to, he sat there the whole time anyway. Just staring straight ahead of
him. Two or three times he said something, sounded like ‘Nothing to be done now,' and ‘Two birds with one stone.' What he meant by that I've no idea, because when I asked him he didn't say.


After I'd looked around a bit I sat down too, and we both waited.


There was a jug of water on the table, and two glasses. And a plate and a bread-knife as well.


When I have to wait time goes so slowly, and then I always get hungry. I've been like that since I was little. I get low blood sugar, and that brings on a headache and I can't think properly. So I always have something to eat with me. But it was outside with my bike. I knew I shouldn't really let the old man out of my sight, but I was so hungry. I couldn't stand it no more. I told Zauner to go on sitting there while I nipped out to get the bag with my sandwich from the bike. I was ever so quick, it didn't take three minutes.


When I got back in, old Zauner was gone. I said to myself, now you've gone and done
it, letting a murderer get away from your very first crime scene.


I turned and went back into the corridor, but then I saw the door to the bedroom was open. He was in there. I went in on tiptoe. Very quiet like, so's he wouldn't notice me watching him. The old man was kneeling beside the bed searching in the bedside table. I looked a little, sideways, and I could see he had a purse in his hand. And a box of letters on the floor beside it. Looked like he was either going to get it all out or put it back specially. First I was surprised, then the scales kind of fell from my eyes. Hey, I says to myself, the cunning old devil, he's laying a false trail. Trying to pretend there's been a robbery with murder here.


That made me furious, so I shouted at him to go and sit down again and look sharp about it.


‘You just get back on that chair,' I shouted at him, and he jumped and went back into the kitchen, not another squeak out of him. Then he stayed sitting there, he didn't dare do nothing else.


I picked up the money and the papers and gave them to our colleagues from the CID.


Then I sat down at the kitchen table with him again and unpacked my snack. I got two bites of it and then Dr Heunisch arrived. Couldn't go on eating then, what would it have looked like? Then all at once it went very fast. Almost as soon as the doctor arrived so did the CID men.