She climbed the stairs with calculated slowness, holding her skirts, stopped for a while on the landing and at last turned a door knob. It resisted. She knocked softly.
‘Who is it?’ came Joseph’s voice.
‘It’s me,’ she breathed.
For two hours Anna and Hans were like two caged animals, angry less at being in a cage than at having been thrown together and bumping into each other at every step.
Anna, unusually for her, did nothing, didn’t feel up to attempting any chore. Whenever she lost her composure, she went and stood behind the counter as if expecting customers.
That was how Hans observed that she shared her mother’s habit of standing on tiptoe and peering out at the quayside, as if clandestinely, above the window display.
Red bricks were being unloaded in the sun, the brightness of the red in stark contrast with the green of the foliage.
But that was a long way away: less than a hundred metres and yet in another world, from which they might have been separated by an unbridgeable gap.
What existed were the voices from upstairs, one very low, the other little more than a whisper: a strange dialogue, consisting first of all of an interminable monologue only punctuated by the occasional rare interjection from Joseph.
The door had been locked. They had also clearly heard the sound of a window being closed.
And all they knew was that Maria Krull was talking, talking, in an even tone, like someone reciting the Bible, like pious women mumbling their rosaries in some dark corner of a church.
‘Are you going to keep wandering around the house like that?’ Anna finally protested, sick with dizziness.
He didn’t reply but threw her a look that was neither spiteful nor ironic. It might not have been affectionate, but for the first time it was imbued with a friendly curiosity.
‘What gave you the idea of coming to this house?’
‘The fact that I couldn’t go anywhere else.’
‘If anything happens’ (she didn’t dare say ‘anything bad’!) ‘you’ll be responsible.’
‘Do you think so?’
He took an acid drop from a jar and popped it in his mouth.
‘What did the inspector say to you?’
‘Nothing … Almost nothing.’
And now, after an hour, they heard a noise different from the others, like a body slumping to the floor, but hard: the sound, more or less, that someone would make falling to his knees.
Anna looked at Hans, who didn’t move. They both held their breaths.
And now came Joseph’s monologue, disjointed, incoherent, interspersed with silences that might have been sobs.
How long did he speak for? Five minutes? Ten? A long time, anyway, long and painful.
Then more noises. It was to be hoped that it was over. There were hurried footsteps, more steps and finally the characteristic creak of bedsprings that had just received the weight of a body.
‘Hans!’
He didn’t turn.
‘Do you know something? Tell me! I’m at the end of my tether! Did Joseph …?’
He didn’t like Anna, for no reason, perhaps because she wasn’t physically exciting, perhaps simply because she didn’t like him either, and yet he was moved, searched for an answer and finally stammered:
‘Who knows?’
They couldn’t cry, any of them! They were under pressure! They would open their mouths to say something and then not utter a word!
What was going on up there? Why the absolute silence? A silence that never ended!
A carter came in, his horsewhip over his shoulder, and said in a familiar tone:
‘I’ll have a brandy.’
Anna served him but overfilled the glass. She had the presence of mind to grab a cloth and wipe the counter.
Phew! On the first floor, they were finally standing. Joseph was speaking. He only uttered a few sentences. His mother resumed her homily. They sat down again. Now they were conversing more calmly …
And Anna, slipping the carter’s coins into the metal-lined till and looking out at the quayside, at last summoned up the courage to say:
‘The best thing you can do is leave. Apart from anything else, you’re going to cause Liesbeth nothing but unhappiness.’
He didn’t have time to ask her what she meant by that. The door upstairs opened and closed. Aunt Maria went into her room, but only stayed there for a few moments. At last she came slowly downstairs, crossed the kitchen and stood at the door leading to the shop.
Head tilted slightly to the right, so much like herself that it was incredible, she murmured:
‘What are you two plotting?’
8.
It was 6.55. On the rectilinear canal, transformed in places into a tunnel by the foliage joining overhead, a few boats were still moving between the green embankments and the rows of trees, some with engines thudding, others drawn slowly by horses, all bathed in the same peace of the evening, the same oblique pink sun setting ablaze the windows of a white house amid the greenery and casting on the ground the outsized shadow of a little girl leading a dappled percheron.
The engine of the Centaure throbbed as it hurried towards the lock at Tilly. The water was split in two. The walls came closer, and the bargee hooted his siren several times, because he could see the lock-keeper, his winch in his hand, walking back to his house.
Shielding his eyes with his hand, the lock-keeper watched the Centaure arrive, consulted his big silver watch and at last resigned himself to slowly opening the gates.
It was three reaches upstream of the Krull house, some seven to eight kilometres. The Tilly lock was the least popular with the bargees, because of its oval basin and its side sluices that let out too much water at once and caused eddies.
The family on the Centaure wanted to get to the village above the lock by nightfall. The bargee’s wife stood in the bow, letting out the steel rope little by little as they advanced.
People had said a hundred times:
‘There’s going to be disaster at the Tilly lock one of these days! A barge will have to go down before the Highways Department makes up its mind to do something about it!’
The disaster happened. Did the woman let the rope out too fast? The barge was pushed away from the wall by the eddies and advanced at least one metre, enough for its bow to get lodged on the concrete, from which the water was receding.
The woman cried out. The bargee ran to the bow. The lock-keeper bent over, but it was already too late: the Centaure, whose bow was almost completely out of the water, was slowly breaking in two.
It was carrying cement.
At the other end of the straight line and the two rows of trees, the Krulls had no inkling of any of this and carried on with their lives as if nothing had happened on the canal.
Just as the accident was taking place, Hans, who had temporarily had enough of the kitchen, the lounge and the shop, was standing at the door of the yard, lighting a cigarette. Throwing away the match, he looked at the low, whitewashed wall that separated the yard from the Guérins’ garden. Above the wall, he saw the head of a little boy who was standing there motionless, perched on something or other, a ladder or a barrel, staring at him wide-eyed.
‘Louis!’ a woman’s voice cried.
The boy didn’t move. He wanted to keep looking, as if dumb-founded at the sight in front of him.
‘Louis! Will you come down? I forbid you to look into those people’s house!’
The door to the workshop was open. Cornelius and his assistant must have heard, but neither of them had reacted; nor did they react when Hans sat down beside them.
But there was a mischievous gleam in the assistant’s eye, especially when Hans began:
‘Did I tell you the story of the monkey? It was when I was living in Düsseldorf, with a cousin of my mother’s who had a perfume shop near the railway station …’
The assistant smiled to himself. It was a smile that was peculiar to him, rather like a man eating a sweet.
He could have kept score in a notebook of all the relatives or friends in whose homes Hans had lived for a while all over Germany. All his stories started in the same way:
‘When I was in Berlin, living with Aunt Marthe …’
Or:
‘When I was on holiday in the Tyrol, staying with my friends the Von Neumanns …’
The assistant would make chewing motions with his mouth, perhaps out of an inner delight at these words, or perhaps because it was a tic.
Apart from the accident at the lock eight kilometres away – but they wouldn’t hear about that until the following day – nothing happened that evening, and the Krull household relaxed, weary from being anxious for such a long time.
Nothing but trifles. For example, as they were sitting down at the table, Joseph’s chair remained empty, and none of them could help looking at it. Yet they had already called up to him twice from the foot of the stairs that dinner was served.
So Aunt Maria went up, without saying a word. She came down a few moments later and simply announced:
‘He’s coming.’
And he came. He didn’t look at anybody. It was obvious he had been crying, but they pretended not to notice.
Similarly, immediately after the meal, it was Aunt Maria who advised him, as if talking to a sick man:
‘Go straight up to bed. It’ll do you good.’
Finally, although they were in the habit of closing the shop much later:
‘I’ll lower the shutters …’
Cornelius didn’t object, even though it was the moment when he liked to stand in the doorway and smoke a last pipe, watching the air turn blue under the trees.
In short, by the grace of Maria Krull, whose chalky fingers seemed to be brushing away a monstrous spider’s web, nothing happened, or rather everything went on as if nothing was happening.
But from time to time, Hans, who, like a woman, sensed much more than he understood, caught a brief glance from his aunt when he was looking somewhere else. It wasn’t a glance like the others, like the old ones. She wanted to know what he thought. She was watching him, scrutinizing him. She knew that he knew. He knew that she knew. It was as if the others, the members of the family, now counted much less than Hans the foreigner!
‘She’d like to speak to me,’ he thought.
‘He guesses that I need him!’ she told herself.
She had lost all her resentment at the scrounger that he was, all her impatience, just as Hans had lost all his irony. They were each waiting for the other to make a move. But it wouldn’t happen this evening. They needed time. Within ten minutes, both were in their rooms.
At this hour, people were strolling casually on the quayside, couples, husbands and wives getting a bit of air or taking their children for a walk, women with little dogs. The red hat went back and forth: Germaine was again accompanied by the same two young girls as at lunchtime.
Presumably because of the hour, and because there were young men about, all three of them adopted a more romantic demeanour, and although they did look towards the Krull house, they didn’t cause a scene.
Much later, when Hans was half asleep, other young men came back from town, singing, and one of them kicked the door, but he might have done it to any of the houses.
Hans, who was sleeping with the window open, was woken by raised voices in the shop. For a moment, he thought Aunt Maria was arguing with someone, but when he listened he realized that the man, a bargee, wasn’t angry with her but with the government and in particular the Highways Department.
Noise was coming from the lock, where groups had formed around a handwritten poster announcing that because of the accident at the Tilly lock, the canal would be shut down for a period of about twenty days.
During the night, the waters had already gone down by twenty centimetres, and big bubbles that evoked the idea of illness rose to the surface.
Still at his window, Hans made another discovery. Some fifty metres from the house, a policeman was standing guard, which wasn’t customary.
There must have been one there all night, perhaps the previous night, too, although Hans hadn’t noticed. That would explain why the girl with the breasts and buttocks had been less demonstrative than before, and also why there hadn’t been any more graffiti scrawled on the house.
The officer was in uniform, which meant he wasn’t there to keep an eye on the Krulls but to protect them. Clearly, Aunt Maria had lodged a complaint.
Hans washed himself from head to foot in cold water, and Anna got into a temper again because he flooded the waxed floor. He served himself coffee as he did every morning and, through the half-open door, again saw his aunt looking at him conspiratorially.
He knew now that it was going to happen soon. Playing the innocent, he picked up the local newspaper, which was put on the counter every morning, although nobody read it apart from Anna, who was interested in the obituaries.
The mysterious affair of Quai Saint-Léonard.
We have learned that there may well be new developments in the Quai Saint-Léonard case. The man named Potut, who had been arrested following the discovery of the body of Sidonie S—, was released several days ago. It has been confirmed that he is not involved in this terrible crime.
We have reason to believe that the police are currently following another lead which appears to be significant.
Pure chance again, surely! An old reporter from the newspaper who had heard some vague rumours while doing his rounds of the police stations!
Hans closed the newspaper and put it back in its place without saying a word. He was wondering when and how Aunt Maria was going to speak to him, if she would do it quite naturally in the shop, or arrange to see him upstairs, or …
He headed for the lounge, which was filled with the din of the piano, and, just as he had done the previous day, passed his hand over the back of Liesbeth’s neck, because he loved to repeat the same gestures, search for certain moods he had already enjoyed.
This time, Liesbeth said nothing, leaned her head forwards a little to decipher her score. Just then, Aunt Maria came in, pretending to get an object from a drawer.
Immediately, Liesbeth stood up and went out. She must have been told:
‘As soon as you see me with him, leave us alone.’
Just as Anna must have been asked to mind the shop!
So at last they were face to face, in the lounge with its flowered wallpaper and fragile trinkets. Hans noticed that his aunt had put on her glasses, which she generally only used for reading. It wasn’t to see him better, but, on the contrary, to hide her eyes from him. Still looking in the drawer, she said without looking at him:
‘Have you heard from your father, Hans?’
He remained unruffled. Even though it was a shock, he smiled and almost felt like muttering:
‘You clever thing, you!’
He understood. He anticipated that what happened next would be unpleasant, but that didn’t stop him from nonchalantly lighting a cigarette, or going to sit on the edge of the table – something his aunt hated.
‘I haven’t had a letter from him lately,’ he replied in a light tone.
‘That’s a pity. Monsieur Schoof is worried about the poor man.’
‘Really?’
She finally abandoned her rummaging in the drawer, which was getting irritating. She remained standing with her back to the window, in her familiar pose, hands folded on her belly.
‘Hasn’t your father been dead for fifteen years?’
Hans’ lips quivered. Yes, this was going to be unpleasant, but he was determined to be a good sport. He decided to laugh, with a tense little laugh.
‘Did the inspector tell you? I’d forgotten that he looked at my passport.’
‘What are you planning to do, Hans?’
He had to think quickly, feel quickly and above all not make a mistake. Two or three days earlier, in the same circumstances, he would simply have had to leave, as had happened to him in other places where he had
settled for a longer or shorter time.
But he remembered the looks his aunt had given him the previous day. He was still watching her closely, convinced that she was playing a game, like a peasant at the market criticizing the cow he is about to buy.
She must have prepared this conversation point by point, as meticulously as if she had written it down. She had started by putting her opponent in a difficult position. But what was her final aim?
‘What am I planning to do? Well, aunt, I admit I don’t yet know. I have a friend in the south, someone I knew at school, but I’m not sure of his address. All I know is that he lives in a villa between Nice and Cannes …’
He was being cynical. He considered that was the best way. He hadn’t expected what came next:
‘What about Liesbeth?’
‘Liesbeth?’ he echoed, giving himself time to recover.
What exactly did his aunt know about his relationship with Liesbeth? Who had spoken? Could it have been Joseph, during the long scene the previous day? Had he told her everything? Or else had Anna informed her mother of her still vague suspicions?
‘You’re not answering.’
What was encouraging in spite of everything was his aunt’s attitude: she remained calm, a touch mournful. It wasn’t the attitude of a woman who has just learned that she is harbouring a con man, someone who, on top of everything else, has taken wicked advantage of her daughter.
What was it, then?
‘I’ll do whatever you decide, aunt!’ he replied without committing himself.
‘Do you realize what you are?’
He brazened it out:
‘I realize I’ve never had any choice, and that my life was bound to work out the way it has.’
It didn’t mean anything, but it allowed him to remain nonchalant, even to look at Maria Krull defiantly. Too bad for her if she took it in that way!
‘Listen, Hans …’
She had already lowered her voice, and he thought:
‘Let’s see what her proposition is!’
Because she was going to make one! This scene was meaningless otherwise. His aunt was actually in an even more difficult position than he was. That was why she had put her glasses on, because they gave her self-confidence and prevented the anguish and indecisiveness in her eyes from being obvious.
The Krull House Page 11
