Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon

thing was that he sensed guilt in his mother. If she had recognized his footsteps in time, would she have hidden the newspaper? Had he intentionally come up the last steps on tiptoe?
    The truth is, he hadn’t been thinking of Lotte, but of Sissy, afraid that she might open her door a crack.
    This time of night she was alone with her saucers. Did she go to bed while waiting for her father to come home? Or stay up, all alone, till midnight?
    He had been afraid, he admitted to himself, of seeing the door open and of being forced to go in, of being alone with her in the dimly lit kitchen with, perhaps, the remains of her supper on the table.
    At night she must fold out the cot. And the door to her bedroom would be left open for the heat.
    It was all really too lousy. Too sad, too ugly.
    â€œWhy don’t you take off your shoes? Bertha!”
    Bertha came to take them off. Sissy, too, would have taken them off, going down on her knees without hesitation.
    â€œYou look tired.”
    â€œIt’s my cold.”
    â€œYou ought to get a good night’s rest.”
    Again he understood. It was like automatically translating from a foreign language. Lotte was advising him to sleep alone, not to have sex. There was one thing she didn’t know yet and that he was only beginning to realize himself: he didn’t want Minna or Bertha or even Sissy.
    A little later she saw to it that his bed was properly made up.
    â€œWill you be warm enough?”
    â€œYes.”
    He wasn’t going to sleep there. Tonight he would sleep in anybody’s bed, even an old woman’s. He needed to feel someone next to him.
    And Minna, who hadn’t had any experience at all when she first arrived and whose thighs still curved on the inside like a little girl’s—Minna seemed to have learned everything in three days. She made a place for his head in the hollow of her arm. She was careful not to talk. She stroked him gently, like a woman nursing her child.
    His mother knew. There was no longer any doubt. The proof was that the next morning the newspaper had disappeared. And there was a little thing he noticed that she would have refused to admit. When she kissed him, as she did every morning, she recoiled slightly. She checked herself instantly and all of a sudden was more affectionate than usual.
    He would get his green card, he was sure. For someone else, that would represent an extraordinary success, a goal you hardly dreamed of attaining, since it made you equal to a section chief on the other side.
    He could have been a section chief.
    He had tried to enlist in the beginning, when they were still fighting with tanks and cannons, and they had sent him back to school.
    For a long time he had hung around the sixth-floor tenant, a bachelor of about forty with a huge brown mustache and mysterious ways. He turned out to be the first to be shot.
    Had the violinist been shot already, or deported? Had they tortured him? No one would ever know, probably, and his mother would be at wit’s end from then on, like so many others. She would keep at it for a while, waiting in lines, knocking on office doors and being sent on her way, then no one would see her anymore, everyone would stop thinking about her, and, one fine day, the concierge would decide to call in a locksmith.
    They would find her in her room, dead for the past week or two.
    He didn’t feel pity, not for anyone. Not even for himself. He didn’t ask for pity, didn’t accept it, and that was what irritated him about Lotte, whose eyes brooded over him, anxious and tender at the same time.
    What interested him was talking to Holst, just once, at length and alone. That desire had been gnawing at him for a long time, even when he was still unconscious of it.
    Why Holst? He didn’t know. Maybe he would never know. He refused to think that it was because he had never had a father.
    Sissy was stupid. That morning while she was cleaning, Bertha had found an