An Untouched House

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  I left the living areas and went into the kitchen. A pan of soup was gently steaming on a smoldering coal stove; no one to be seen. I returned to the hallway on my way to the upper floors. A staircase with highly ornate, carved and gilded banisters curved up like a boomerang. Perhaps, I thought, every booby trap in the entire house will explode when I set foot on the top step. A woman came here to set them just before fleeing and forgot to grab her coat.

  There was a room with a desk and bookcases. One room was locked. “Anybody there?” I called, hitting the jamb with my rifle butt. All I heard was my own breathing and, eventually, my heartbeat. Force the door? No, a waste of time. I went into a large bedroom that was separated from an even larger bathroom by thick drapes. The tub rose to knee height in the middle of a marble floor. Two bronze hydras were holding their heads over the side. I turned on the taps, both at once.

  The water coming out of one of them immediately warmed up. A hot water tap with hot water! I hadn’t seen that the whole war! I was so thrilled I took off my clothes and filled the bath. Whoever was hidden in the house, let them come; I wouldn’t resist. Yes, I had understood the sergeant’s damn order perfectly well! He had said, “I don’t want to see your filthy mug again! I don’t want to smell that rancid hide of yours anymore! Get the hell out of here and go and scrub your stinking rump!” That was what the Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Slovenian, or whatever he was had said. Booby traps! No booby traps anywhere!

  I stepped over the tub’s low rim and lay down. My sense of hilarity passed. Some of the water trickled into my mouth. It tasted like the water spouting from the fountains on the corners of the streets. After lying in it for several minutes, I got the impression it had an ossifying effect. I would gradually fall asleep. All feeling would slowly withdraw from my body, from the outside in, concentrating in one spot and then disappearing into nothing. First my skin would grow numb, and then, in the end, I wouldn’t be able to feel my heartbeat. If people stopped feeling altogether, the world would be greatly improved. They could lose an arm or leg without noticing; it wouldn’t feel any different from cutting your nails. They could bleed to death without feeling it, smiling all the while. At a very young age! Babies would calmly continue to suck their thumbs while being boiled in bathwater that was way too hot. Who would notice a hole in their head unless it hurt? Who would bother to lie down in bed if they weren’t weak or aching? People should be numb. Then they would never have reached such numbers! This many would never have survived! But they’re more likely to go blind or deaf than numb. It’s slight subtle tricks like this that keep the world turning.

  I looked at my body to see if it hadn’t already begun changing into a greenish yellow mummy. I didn’t even fall asleep. Through a tall window I saw the pollarded top of the plane tree, mottled with white patches like a door with filler. Outside it was still quiet; there hadn’t been any more shooting. I couldn’t hear any cars or trucks driving around either. The bit of sky I could see turned red and then purple; the objects in the room quickly faded from view. I took my time. Not wanting to leave anything untested, I pulled the light cord. We ourselves were in the habit of wiring the odd mine into the electricity system of the houses we were retreating from, but here nothing happened, no explosion. No light either. Now I remembered the half-burnt candles everywhere in the rooms and hallways. This town must have been without electricity for quite a while. I was safe, solving the puzzles with ease. I could stay in the bath as long as I liked.

  It wasn’t until a bomb suddenly exploded not far away and made the water splash that I stood up to get dressed again. I dried myself off, walked naked to the bedroom, fetched a candle, and screwed together a Gillette safety razor that, like everything, had been lying ready on the side of the sink. More and more bombs fell. I heard machine guns too, but couldn’t see anything in particular through the window. I stood before a mirror in which I could see myself from head to toe to shave. If I had a room lined entirely with mirrors I could stay in it forever without getting bored, like Robinson Crusoe on his island. Those who only think are only half in touch with themselves. Seeing is more valuable, seeing is everything. Seeing yourself as someone else would be salvation, but you always stay on the wrong side.

  I was extra attentive. Now that I was so clean, I expected to discover all kinds of things in my face. I discovered nothing. All the things I had been through were gone without trace. Memory can’t keep up with appearance. An eighty-year-old in front of a mirror doesn’t get the impression he saw someone else in it when he was eight.

  But at that moment I had changed so much I couldn’t bring myself to put my dirty underwear and uniform back on. I opened a wardrobe in the bedroom and found a whole row of suits on hangers; shirts and ties folded on a shelf above them. While trying to work out a way of keeping up a pair of trousers that were too baggy but also too short, I heard heavy engines race past on the other side of the house. I didn’t worry about what it might mean. I had already heard enough racket to last a lifetime. Feeling hungry, I thought about the soup I had seen earlier in the kitchen. When I was ready (the white shirt as crisp and delectable as pastry), I went downstairs and ate from the pan with a wooden spoon.

  After finishing it off, I lay down in the drawing room on a sofa covered with cushions and smoked a cigarette. I looked up at the ceiling, which was a representation of heaven with gilded cherubs, and tapped the ash off over the rug, though not without a sense of inner disapproval, and this from a man who had blown his nose on his shirt and long stopped washing his hands before eating, not to mention brushing his teeth, someone who for three years had spat wherever he liked and gone weeks without so much as wiping his ass.

  It was like I had to behave respectably again, even though the owner of the house could count himself lucky if I didn’t loot it. His maid had cooked some soup while I was squirming on the ground with thirst. Before leaving, I was definitely going to look in the cellar. That would set things right again. A nice bottle for the sergeant. It would never occur to him that I didn’t understand his orders.

  I stubbed the cigarette out on the underside of the sofa, thought of all the things I had seen in the house and felt like I was present in all those places at once. In a house you never need to doubt anything because it’s easy to go back to check and make sure you weren’t mistaken. Being alone in a house where nobody can come to move something or take it away: a life could be counted a success for less. But in this house I hadn’t been everywhere; there was that one room I couldn’t get into. Maybe I wasn’t even alone. Though I still couldn’t hear any creaking or rustling anywhere.

  I stared straight back at my mother, who was pointing reproachfully at the muddy white footprints I’d left on the rug. “But you’re dead,” I answered, though she hadn’t spoken. “Aren’t you supposed to be buried today?”

  I was woken by the sound of a large clock striking the hour. It was coming from the depths of the house. The candle had burnt down, but the room wasn’t dark. A red glow from an enormous fire waxed and waned. The sounding of the clock stopped and started again. I got up off the sofa. Then I realized that the ringing was coming from the doorbell. Not answering would have been futile. Who could it be, if not one of our own partisans? I walked to the hall. Someone was shining an electric torch in through the glass of the front door, the beam gliding over the wall. When it reached me, it turned off. I could see the person who was holding it clearly through the wrought iron.

  But only when I had opened the door and stepped through it, did I see that it was a German. With his helmet down low over his eyes he looked like a dark lamppost. He saluted with a gloved hand and asked, “Are you the inhabitant of this house?” I peered out over his head at a motorbike leaning against the plane tree. I stared at the fire and made out three distinct sources.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been ill. I was asleep.”

  “Ah, so! That’s braver than running away like everyone else in this damn hol
e. How many rooms are there in your house?”

  A spray of long sparks sprouted from something burning low on the horizon. I didn’t answer.

  “We would like to billet a number of officers here.”

  “I congratulate the German army on liberating us so promptly,” I answered, “Heil Hitler.”

  Meanwhile my mind raced. How many rooms in the house? I wasn’t even sure how many floors.

  The German gestured as if to show that retaking the town had been no trouble at all, then walked back to his motorbike after I had told him that I would be glad to provide the officers with a place to stay.

  I slammed the door, lit a candle and began wandering through the house, moving very slowly to avoid blowing it out. I didn’t want to flee, but needed to escape while I still could. I had been on the run for so long. But I really didn’t know where to go anymore. And when I saw my uniform lying on the bathroom floor in the candlelight like a pile of rags, the clothes of a murdered man, I felt even less like pulling it on than I had a few hours earlier. What would that lead to anyway? If the Germans found me they would take me prisoner. And then they would find out who I was soon enough. Or maybe they shot partisans dead on the spot.

  I hid everything in the mirror-fronted wardrobe. But I put my rifle under the bed with my bullets and hand-grenades. Then I thought: now I need to search the whole house so I know it well. Then they won’t question it being my rightful property.

  But I didn’t get time for that. Again I heard the doorbell.

  The candle blew out when I opened the door. The officers shone their torches at me, making it impossible for me to take in their faces.

  “Heil Hitler,” I said. “I am the son of the house. My parents and two sisters have fled. They are probably at my uncle’s in Breslau by now. Treat this house as if it were your own. But I am counting on nothing being damaged.”

  “Oh, no! We won’t cause any unnecessary disturbance.”

  “There is plenty of space. You can use the downstairs rooms. You may also play the piano, but not after eleven. I am very weak and go to bed early.”

  I led the way upstairs. They followed me with their torches. My shadow undulated across the steps.

  “These rooms,” I said, pointing at the bathroom, the large bedroom, the library and the room that was locked, “are the ones I use myself.”

  “Of course, of course. We understand.”

  “And upstairs,” I said, “there is more room for you, if required. – Now I must wish you good night.” Before they could answer, I shook their hands and went into the bedroom. I heard one of them go back downstairs, the others stood around talking. It was several hours before they’d settled down. They lugged boxes up the stairs. Vehicles came and went. Heavy artillery was coughing in the distance. I was still dressed, lying across the twin beds. I’d left the curtains open. The light in the room was constantly fluctuating as the fires no one was putting out flared up and died down again.

  The sergeant had taken me prisoner. “What were you really planning?” he asked. “What were you really thinking? That the Germans were going to stay? See, we’ve kicked them out again in two days. What did you really want: to stay in that house? To just ignore us from now on? Where’s your uniform?” But maybe the Germans would stay. The war couldn’t last much longer. I would stay here, resting at last. Unless one of the officers came up to me, his hand full of anti-German pamphlets. “You are the son of the house, you say. This is what we have found here in the house. What is the meaning of it? You’re not ill at all. You, the only person who stayed behind in a town everyone else has fled. You’re a spy, admit it. Come with me to the garden. Then we’ll make an end to it with a bullet in the back of your head.” How was I supposed to prove I wasn’t really the son of the house; by pulling out my Russian uniform, perhaps?

  Then I thought of the locked room. That was where the owners had taken all the incriminating material before leaving. I just had to make sure the Germans stayed away from it. Then I’d be safe.

  I, the son of the house, woke up the next morning to general quiet, thinking: I have always lived here. This is my home.

  Dirty underwear was lying in a pile in the hallway. They had taken a bear’s head down to use the hook as a coat rack. The door to the cellar had been forced. Good, that saved me the trouble of doing it myself. I went down the steps. The cellar was so crammed with provisions – sugar and beans in sacks, tins and preserving jars on shelves, racks filled with bottles of wine – that I couldn’t actually tell if anything had been taken, but that was irrelevant. I, the son of the house, would not stand for it.

  When I saw a colonel coming home in the afternoon, I went to meet him and complain.

  “Those fellows were extremely tired,” the colonel answered, “people do get a little careless then.” He took off his cap and ran a hand over his head. It had been a long time since his neck and the back of his head had been shaved and they were covered with mossy white fluff.

  “They weren’t too tired to break into the cellar,” I said.

  The colonel put his cap back on, erupted in anger, and exclaimed that it would never happen again. When he walked on, I bowed my head, as if that might help me forget all about him. I wanted to be alone, completely alone.

  Late that evening a corporal armorer who had changed the lock in the cellar door brought me two new keys.

  “How many did you keep for you and your friends?” I asked.

  “You’re a real card,” he answered. – I never saw any indication he had. They didn’t make any more mess either. A week later two of them were hard at work in the garden beating the rugs. On the piano they played exclusively classical music. Always the same two pieces: the “Turkish March” and Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

  Someone slid a sheet of paper with a signature and two stamps on it under my bedroom door. The town was being declared off-limits to civilians, but I had been given an exemption. The war had moved relatively far away. It was quiet on the street. There was no fighting in the immediate surroundings; German soldiers were few and far between and there was no one else around at all. Now and then I would go for a walk in the gardens surrounding an abandoned kursaal, a nineteenth-century building with yellow columns and flaking stucco. An explosion had blown the glass out of the doors and windows. I went inside. There was a large relaxation area with red plush ottomans along the walls and a round balustrade in the middle of the tiled floor. Below it was an open cellar with glass and nickel fittings around the mouth of the spring. The cellar was slowly filling with water; the first time I went there the fittings were already half submerged. The next day the water was running out through the cellar windows. It wasn’t draining away properly and had formed a moat around the building. There was a black tom on the window ledge. As I waded over to him; his back arched like a whip. He looked like he had been made from a single length of steel cable, split to form his different parts: tail, head and legs, claws and whiskers. I picked him up and took him home, clinging to me like a bur. He didn’t let go until I had gone into the house and upstairs. Back on the ground again, his tail rose slowly and he slunk over to the door of the room that hadn’t been opened yet. He meowed and butted his head against the jamb. I dropped down onto all fours to see if there was a chink above the sill. There was, but I couldn’t smell what the cat could smell. I stayed there on the floor next to him, stroking his back. “It’s nothing,” I said, “and if it is something, we can’t get in anyway. Come on.” I had already tried every key I had found in the house, but none of them fit. I picked the cat back up and shut him in my room. On my way out to the garden, I ran into the colonel again in the hall downstairs. He asked if I had any more complaints about this or that.

  “No,” I answered, “and it wasn’t that bad anyway, given the extraordinary circumstances. In times of war not everyone can remain well-mannered all of the time.” I’m happy to gloss over anything,
I thought, just hurry up about it and leave me in peace.

  “Extraordinary circumstances!” he cried, “I don’t recognize any extraordinary circumstances!” It was bright sunny weather. Only the chirping of birds was reaching us. He began to make a show of tapping a cigarette on a silver case.

  “Since joining the army,” he said, “I have shaved every day without fail at exactly half past six in the morning. With hot water. I have been in the army for forty years today. Shaving with hot water, war or no war! That is what I understand by culture!” Although taller than me, he kept bouncing up and down, making his boots creak.

  “Culture gives no quarter! Culture is a single whole! Extraordinary circumstances are only an excuse! Someone who gives in to extraordinary circumstances, nah! He is simply no longer a person of culture!”

  I said nothing. You make me sick to my stomach, I thought. He now relaxed a little, moving his weight onto one foot while rocking on the other heel, and continued talking.

  “In the last war the British barrage began one morning at quarter past six. At half past I began shaving. It was too dark in the trench, so I moved to higher ground. That cost me half my little finger. But at half past seven I was sitting down to eat breakfast!” He stopped to look at me; he didn’t show me the half-shot-off finger. I didn’t care what he understood by culture. I didn’t care what he thought about any subject whatsoever. I resolved to avoid him, to avoid everyone. What use was talk? I hadn’t talked for so long; now I was in a position to start again, it could only be my undoing.