Reverend Father Meissner, age 63
I have been priest of this parish since the end of the war. That’s nearly ten years now.
But to the best of my knowledge such a thing as this, a murder, has never happened here before.
Many families in the parish are deeply distressed and shaken. Some won’t leave their houses now after nightfall. Community life has ceased to exist. Everyone distrusts his neighbor. It’s nothing short of a tragedy.
We all believed the bad years were behind us at last, life was gradually getting back on an even keel. By now everyone who came from this village is home again. Life had returned to normal—and now this murder. Suddenly there’s fear abroad once more, people question everything. We see how deceptive appearances can be in everyday life. But let’s not talk about that.
You want to ask me about the Danner family, I’m sure. Ah yes, the Danner family. What the
Danners were like. Well, I think old Frau Danner was a good Christian soul. A simple woman, but very devout. She often sought and found comfort in prayer. She was very reserved, and latterly her reserve was if anything more marked. I think she had already come to the end of her journey, and was preparing herself inwardly for life after death. As far as I can judge, she was loving to her grandchildren.
Her husband was a patriarch in all senses of the word, good and bad. What he said was law in the family. No one was to rebel against him, no one. No one was to go against his will. He was certainly a believer, if in his own way. I’d say he was a man of the Old Testament. Hard on himself, hard on his family.
His daughter, Barbara. I thought for a long time she was suffering from her father’s autocratic ways. But now I’m not so sure. Barbara had been greatly influenced by her father. I’d say the two of them were bound by a love-hate relationship.
On the one hand she admired her father. In her brusque way she was often very like him. On the other hand, I can’t shake off a feeling that she detested him. Truly detested him.
She would never confide in me, although I tried to induce her to do so several times. But there was the way she sometimes looked at him when she thought she was unobserved. To me, as a man of God, it was very strange. There was hatred in her eyes. Not love, no: hatred.
As a priest one is confronted with all aspects of human life. And you may believe me when I say I have seen and known much. It was recently in particular that I more and more often saw dislike, indeed venom, in her eyes.
The child Marianne was a dreamer, a little dreamer. I taught her Religious Instruction at school. She was very quiet and dreamy. A pretty little girl with blond braids. I cannot bear to think that she too fell victim to the murderer’s hand. She and little Josef. Why, I ask myself, why can such a thing happen, why are two innocent children victims of such a wicked deed?
The mills of God grind slowly, but I do firmly believe that this deed cannot remain unatoned for. If no sentence is passed here and now on the murderer or murderers, then he or they will still not escape just retribution.
I am firmly of the opinion that none of us here can be the murderer. I wouldn’t believe such a thing of any member of my congregation. No right-minded Christian can have committed such a diabolical crime.
What became of Barbara’s husband? You mean Vinzenz?
There’s a rumor that he emigrated to America. But the only certain fact is that he isn’t here anymore. He disappeared overnight. Vinzenz was one of those refugees uprooted from their homes who came to us in the weeks and months after the
end of the war, in search of a new homeland, a new place where they could live and survive.
He found work on the Danner family’s farm. It wasn’t until Barbara was pregnant that she married Vinzenz.
I can’t approve, of course, but directly after the collapse of the regime ideas of morality and order were in some confusion. After that terrible inferno, people were hungry not just for food but for physical closeness too.
It was one of the first wedding services I conducted in my new parish. Why did the marriage not last? Well, people may come together in turbulent times when in other circumstances they would never have done so. Many of these unions last, in spite of the problems of daily life, but others break under the stress of them.
Vinzenz Spangler was no farmer, and he couldn’t get used to life on the farm. In particular he had a very difficult relationship with his father-in-law, and so he left.
Two years ago Barbara became pregnant again. Georg Hauer was entered in the baptismal register as little Josef’s father. I wasn’t going to condemn anyone.
The week before her terrible death, Barbara came to see me in the presbytery. She wanted to confess, she said. But then the next moment she thought better of it. She seemed agitated, nervous. There was something on her mind. I told her to lighten her conscience.
At that her mood changed, she became defiant, almost aggressive. She had nothing to confess, she said. She didn’t have to ask forgiveness for anything, she had done nothing wrong. Then she turned to go. I stopped her, because she had left an envelope lying there. I could have that for the church, she said, or for needy souls.
“Do as you like with it. It’s all the same to me.”
And then she left the house quickly, without another word. There were 500 marks in the envelope. I still have them in my desk drawer.
T
here is perspiration on Barbara’s forehead. In spite of the cold, in spite of the chilly wind blowing in her face, she is sweating. She hurries up the road to her property.
Her
property. Her father has transferred the farm over to her. She’s her own mistress now. Her own mistress.
She has been to see the priest. She entered his room with some hesitation. She looked for an excuse. Wanted to speak to him, to ease herself and her conscience.
But then, when she was facing the priest, she stood there like a schoolgirl, couldn’t get out the words she had been planning to say. He sat there behind his desk.
What brought her to him? Was there something weighing on her conscience?
And there was a smile on his lips. That omniscient, self-satisfied smile.
His request for her to lighten her conscience, and that smile, too, the look in his eyes, had been enough to silence her completely.
Why should she do it?
Was this man to be her judge? Was he to sit in judgment on her life and what she had done? No, she didn’t want to talk to him about it. Didn’t want to receive absolution from any man. What absolution, why should she?
She had done nothing wrong. Wrong had been done to her. Wrong had been done to her since she was twelve years old.
For years she had fought against her feelings of guilt, had always done as she was told.
At school they were taught that Eve gave Adam the apple, and so both were guilty of original sin and were driven out of Paradise.
She hadn’t driven anyone out of Paradise. She had been driven out of it herself.
To this day she sees her father before her. Her father, whom she had loved so much. She remembers feeling his hands on her body, those groping hands.
She had lain there perfectly rigid. Incapable of moving. Frozen. Hardly daring to breathe.
Eyes tight shut, she lay there in her bed. Not wanting to believe what was happening to her. Her father’s breath on her face. His groans in her ears. The smell of his sweat. The pain that filled her body. She kept her eyes shut, tight shut. As long as she didn’t see anything, nothing could be happening.
Only what I see can happen to me, she had told herself.
Next morning her father was the same as usual. For weeks nothing more happened. She had almost forgotten the incident. Had suppressed the memory of her father’s smell, the smell of his sweat, his groan, his lust. It was all hidden behind a thick veil of mist.
She still wanted to be “a good daughter.” Just that, a good daughter. She wanted to honor her father and her mother. As the priest always said they must in Religious Instruction. Everything her father did was right. He was the center of her life, he was Lord God Almighty on the farm.
She had never seen anyone contradict him or oppose him. Her mother didn’t. She herself couldn’t either. With time, the intervals between the occasions when he came to her grew shorter. More and more often he wanted to spend all night in her bed.
Her mother seemed not to notice any of it. She kept quiet. Quiet as she had always been for as long as Barbara could remember. No one noticed anything.
In time Barbara got the impression that what her father did was right, and her disgust for him was wrong. After all, her father loved her, loved only her.
She wanted to be grateful, to be a good daughter.
Like the girls in the story of Lot and his daughters. Lot who had fled from the city of Sodom into the wilderness with his daughters. Lot lay with his daughters there, and they both bore him children.
That was what it said in the Bible. Why, Barbara asked herself, why should what was pleasing to God in Lot’s case be wrong in hers? She was a good daughter.
She twice bore her father a child. She twice let herself be persuaded to name another man as its father.
The first of them, Vinzenz, came to their farm just after the war, a refugee from the East. He was glad to work on the farm and have a roof over his head.
It came easily to her to make eyes at him, and when she told him she was pregnant he was ready to marry her at once. He saw prospects of money and the farm ahead.
When her husband discovered the secret of her child’s real father, even before Marianne was born, he threatened to see them all sent to prison. Her father gave him a considerable sum of money, saying that Vinzenz could go to the city with it, or even emigrate.
Vinzenz agreed to be bought off, and he left the farm at the first opportunity.
Where is he now? She has no idea, and it was a matter of indifference to her at the time. The deal gave her a father for her child.
And life on the farm went on.
When she became pregnant again, and this time there was no man around who could shoulder responsibility in the eyes of the public, her father had the idea of palming the child off on Hauer.
At the time Hauer had just lost his wife. It was easy for Barbara to seduce the man. The “old fool,” as she called him, swallowed her story with eager passion. Barbara had to laugh out loud. It was easy to pull the wool over a man’s eyes.
Matters didn’t become difficult until Hauer urged her to marry him. She must find out where Vinzenz was and sue for divorce, he said. Or even better, get him declared legally dead. These things could be done, he knew “the right people,” everything was possible for cash down.
She made more and more excuses, until she finally broke up with him.
The man gave her no peace. He stood outside her window for nights on end. Knocking, begging to be let in.
He even lay in wait for Barbara, urging her to come back to him.
Barbara was repelled by the man. Just as she had always been repelled by her father. The older she grew, the less she wanted
to be a good daughter. Her abhorrence of her father and men in general grew greater all the time.
They were all the same in their greed, their nauseating lust.
With the years, she had learned to make her father dependent on her. She loved it when he begged for a night with her, even went on his knees to her. She had him in her hands. The relationship had changed. Now she called the shots.
He must pay for his forbidden passion. Pay with the farm. He has transferred the farm over to her, on her conditions. She dictated the agreement to him. Now he depends on her and her favor.
Of course she wanted to buy forgiveness with her donation. She wanted to be free, and free also of a sin that she would never have committed of her own accord.
T
ime passes very slowly. The minutes and hours crawl by at a snail’s pace.
Mick is still on the alert. The house isn’t quiet yet.
He is waiting for his moment to arrive. In his mind, Mick goes over the plan once more. He’s going to wait until the house is quiet and then go down into the barn.
The fire-raising trick. He’s often done it before. It’s easy.
The people who live in the farmhouse are lying in their beds. He starts a fire in the barn.
The cry of “Fire! Fire!” would be enough to wake Danner and his family abruptly. Drowsy with sleep, they’d run to the barn to save what they could.
What with all the panic now breaking out, he’d have plenty of time to get into the house. The Danners would be busy getting their cattle out of the sheds to save them from the flames. In the ensuing chaos he’d find and purloin all the ready cash in the farmhouse. The Danners would be much too busy keeping the fire under control and raising the alarm to stop him.
Afterward, no one would be able to say who first spotted the fire. His own tracks would go up in flames along with the barn, and he’d have disappeared into the woods by the time the blaze was out.
Mick leaves his hiding place in the loft. The moment seems to have come. It has been quiet in the house for some time now. Carefully, he makes his way forward to the suspended ceiling of the barn. To the threshing floor there. He pauses. Hears his heartbeat, hears his own breathing.
A rustling beneath him. A thought flashes through his mind: there’s someone down there in the barn! Why didn’t he see him coming? How could he have made such a mistake? No point thinking about it now. Whoever’s down there must leave before Mick can strike.
A second person comes into the barn. Mick hears a woman’s voice. He knows that voice. It’s Barbara’s.
He doesn’t recognize the man’s voice. It’s not Danner anyway, Mick is sure of that. What are they talking about? Mick can hear the voices, but he can’t make out what they’re saying.
He lies flat on the floor. Now he can peer through the floorboards.
The exchange of words is turning into a quarrel. The voices grow louder, the woman’s rises, hysterical, shrill. The man takes Barbara by the throat, choking her. It all happens fast as lightning.
For a moment Mick turns his head aside. Tries to get a better view from another position.
When the two below are back in his field of vision at last, the man is raising a pickax above his head. Bringing it down on Barbara, who collapses without a sound. Lies on the barn floor. Her attacker goes on striking the defenseless body on the
floor in mindless rage. Brings the pickax down again and again. It is some time before he leaves her alone.
Mick lies on the suspended ceiling of the barn, hardly dares to breathe, to move.
He’s killed old Danner’s daughter, the thought goes through his mind. Killed her like a mangy cat!
The unknown man bends over the battered body, lifts it. Tries to drag the lifeless form away from the door, further inside the barn. Away from the light, into the darkness.
Suddenly there are steps, a voice. Old Frau Danner is standing in the doorway. Mick holds his breath.
“Barbara, where are you? Are you in the barn?”
The old woman is struck down even before she has really entered the barn.