Free The Dark Meadow by Andrea Maria Schenkel

only to buy something to eat. Out and about allday, going from house to house. Ringing bells. Towards seven he’d had enough of it, he’d thought he deserved his hard-earned supper.
    Sharpening knives didn’t bring in much money these days. People didn’t value his craft any more. Even ten years ago he’d made a decent living, but now? People these days bought mass-made implements, knives with plastic handles, available for the price of a sandwich. All cheap, all easy to come by; if you needed something new you went to Woolworth’s, where they sold their customers rubbish. You couldn’t sharpen a knife like that, its blade would bend the moment you so much as looked at it, and if he put it on the whetstone he could expect it to break, it was such poor quality.
    â€˜The good old days are over,’ he said to himself under his breath, holding on to the table to help him get to his feet. He’d been on the road as long as he could remember. He wasn’t a gypsy; his family belonged to the continental travelling people known as the Yenish. They had been pedlars, knife-grinders and basket-weavers for generations, all of them decent folk with a licence to trade on the road and a small house in the Unterlichtenwald area. In the bad times of the Third Reich, when even the licence to trade wasn’t valid any more and his father had been forced to go and work in the munitions factory, that little househad saved their lives, even if the other Yenish looked down on them for having a fixed address.
    â€˜If you live in a house you’re not a Yenish any more, you’re one of the Gachi people.’
    But the fact was that without a fixed address they’d all have been bound for Dachau.
    A man like Karrer couldn’t stay in one place, and after the war he was off again. It’s in your blood, you can’t change that, he told himself.
    Two or three times a year he came to these parts, so he knew the inn. He had his usual routes. It was two years after the war he’d been here for the first time, and after that every year apart from a few interruptions.
    â€˜Damn it all, that’s long ago!’ he said to himself under his breath, and getting unsteadily to his feet he patted his jacket in search of cigarettes and his lighter. However, as he couldn’t find either he sat down on the chair again.
    He’d been in Einhausen again yesterday, so he’d come in here. He had ordered brawn. As usual. They made the best brawn in the whole region here in the Baitz area. The waitress had a sharp tongue, but the food was good and you got value for your money.
    A couple of guests at the next table had started talking politics. He listened for a while, and then joined in theirdispute over the table, until finally he picked up his beer and sat down with them.
    Later, when the room was emptying, the talk became more and more heated. Stories from the ‘old times’ went back and forth, and comments on how with someone like Adolf in charge, this or that wouldn’t happen.
    He hadn’t noticed how much he had drunk. Normally he was moderate in his drinking, but yesterday … well, he must have had a few too many beers with schnapps as chasers.
    Once again, he searched his pockets in vain for a cigarette.
    â€˜Damn it, where the hell did I put them?’
    If the others hadn’t left, he would have gone on arguing and drinking, and that on a day when business had been slow. When the last at his table got tired of the dispute and went home, he had ordered a final half of beer and a snifter of fruit spirits as a chaser.
    â€˜No point in standing on one leg.’
    And as always when he’d been drinking, and was discontented with the stupidity and injustice of the world, the whole wretched story came back into his mind. What still annoyed him was that they’d never caught the real murderer. Worse, they hadn’t even looked for him. The man who’d fucked