All that Johann Zauner could remember later was Afra lying face up on the sofa. Her eyes were open, and broken glass was scattered over the floor. He had trodden on the glass – even long afterwards he remembered the noise when he did that. The crunch as he ground the glass under the soles of his shoes. He stood there, and didn’t understand what had happened. He saw that her hair was beginning to go red with the blood that was slowly seeping into the sofa. With a trembling hand, he touched her forehead, passed his hand tenderly over her lids and closed her eyes.
It was only then that he heard the whimpering. He felt as if it were abruptly rousing him from a dream. He looked around enquiringly, and finally he found the child lying on the floor, half covered by the chair that had fallen over. He pushed the chair aside, awkwardly helped the little boy up and held him tightly. Very tightly, not the way you hold a child, more like a bundle of rags when you have to take care not to let any scraps of fabric drop out.
‘Don’t be scared, it will be all right, it will be all right,’ he kept saying again and again.
He spoke only to hear a calming voice, and so as not to feel alone.
*
With the whimpering child held to his chest, he went out into the yard. Both arms firmly round the bundle, he set off to go over to the neighbour’s house. He had gone half the way before he noticed something wet and warm running through his fingers and down his arms. And when he stopped and looked down at himself, he saw the blood. He didn’t know what to do, and waited a moment. He took a few steps forward, then a few more in the opposite direction, and finally he turned and went slowly back to the house.
In the kitchen, he pushed the broken glass and the hoe lying on the floor aside, and laid the child carefully on the floor beside the sofa. He didn’t want to put the boy down beside his dead mother, there wasn’t enough room, and he was afraid that he might make an incautious movement, fall off the sofa and hurt himself. And he couldn’t bring himself to touch Afra again. He fetched the old woollen shawl from the bedroom and covered the child with it. He was afraid the little boy might catch his death of cold, lying on the floor like that.
At some time he must have gone over to the neighbour’s. They said he had called to him over the fence, telling him to get in touch with the police. Or at least, that was what the police officers told him later. He didn’t remember it himself. If memory is a vessel full to the brim with what you had experienced, then his was broken like the pieces of the glass bottle in the kitchen that he had trodden on. His memories were fragments, with gaps between them that couldn’t be filled; on many days he could no longer distinguish between what was real and what he had only dreamed. There’d been more and more quarrelling recently. It made him furious, he felt he was being unfairly blamed for doing or not doing things that he couldn’t remember any more. In the end he was almost sure that his wife and daughter were hand in glove against him, hiding things on purpose and saying he’d done this or that, just to make him look like a liar and thus infuriate him.
From the evidence of the police officer Hermann Irgang, now retired, eighteen years after the events concerned
Like I said, I told Zauner to sit down. He was crouching there in silence, clutching the shirt tightly in his hands. The liquid ran out of it, dripped on the floor and formed a puddle there. Half the kitchen was already awash. I went over, took the knotted fabric out of his hands and put it beside the sink. The whole time, old Zauner just sat there without moving.
Then we went over to the sofa. Afra was lying there with her eyes closed, but there was a gaping wound on her forehead, right on the hairline. Her hair was reddish with blood, and her hands were cut and scratched as if she’d tried with all her might to defend herself. There must have been a terrible struggle between them before he overpowered her and threw her on the sofa. All the same, she looked very peaceful lying there. I’ll never forget it. It was as if death had come as a release, and yet dying like that must have been so cruel for her.
Weinzierl and I both stood looking at the corpse without a word. Out in these parts folk don’t get murdered, not by friends and certainly not by their own fathers. When you die, you die in your own bed, of sickness, in childbirth, of consumption, or of old age because it’s simply time for you to go. Very occasionally someone dies in an accident or at work. In the woods or the fields. The only violence we see around here is a bit of brawling in the pub, or quarrelling over girls at the fair on the anniversary of the consecration of the church, when the lads throw tankards at each other’s heads. But they’re always dead drunk by then, can’t hardly keep on their feet. It’s surprising enough they can even attack each other with the tankards in that state, without losing their balance. And afterwards there’s always a lot of talking, they all get worked up, they shout and accuse each other of starting the fight, and some of them begin crying like babies.
But here? Old Zauner sat on his chair and never moved, no weeping nor wailing. Me, I felt sure that if I’d been in his place, and it was my daughter lying there in her own blood, it would break my heart. I’d be pacing around the room mad with grief and pain, accusing God of making the world such a bad place and not stopping what I loved best being taken from me. But the old man just sat there as if it were nothing to do with him.
We didn’t see the little boy until later. He was lying under a shawl beside the sofa, crying quietly.
I knew there was no helping Afra now. But when we found the child under the woollen shawl and he was still breathing, I hoped if I got him to the doctor right away then the little mite could be saved. So I lost no time, I put him in a basket, and I cycled off to Dr Heunisch with it as fast as I could go.
I told young Weinzierl to watch the suspect and never take his eyes off him, not for a moment, until I got back with the doctor and the murder squad.
Because when someone is murdered it’s not a case for a little village policeman anymore: that’s when the specialists come in.
I got in touch with our colleagues in the criminal investigation department, and about three in the afternoon I was back on the scene of the crime with the murder squad, and at four the forensics people arrived with someone from the public prosecutor’s office.
The little boy died later in hospital.