‘Listen to me …’
She was still hesitating, looking down at the floor.
‘Monsieur Schoof could lodge a complaint. Because of you, because your papers aren’t in order and we didn’t declare you to the police, we’re already going to have to pay a heavy fine, the inspector told me that yesterday. As for Liesbeth, she’s a minor, and if there were any consequences …’
She had to turn her head away. The vision through her glasses was blurred, because the lenses had steamed up.
‘There won’t be any!’ he hastened to assert.
He was sure of himself. And he really did want to remove any concern she might have on that point.
She, for her part, didn’t dare insist.
‘Anyway, you have to go … You won’t even be able to stay in France, because you’ll need money, and the inspector told me you won’t get a work permit …’
These last words irresistibly provoked a smile from Hans, who was no longer embarrassed at all.
‘And you realize you won’t be able to stay here. Even if nothing had happened, we couldn’t have kept you here, doing nothing. We aren’t rich … People don’t look favourably on us …’
‘I know …’
No, that wasn’t sufficient. She was insistent, and she must have her reasons. She was speaking slowly, which proved that it was a prepared speech and that she was afraid of losing the thread.
‘We may be naturalized, but people treat us as foreigners. If it wasn’t for the bargees and the carters, we’d have to close the grocery. You come here straight from Germany and do nothing to pass unnoticed. On the contrary …’
He smiled again. It was true! He felt a wicked pleasure in playing the foreigner, in speaking German, in sitting on café terraces and asking for different drinks from other people, and in walking the streets bare-headed in an open-necked shirt, as nobody else in the neighbourhood did.
‘What was I saying?’
‘That I don’t do anything to pass unnoticed.’
She bent down and watched through the window as the woman next door, Madame Guérin, swept her stretch of the pavement and occasionally cast angry glances at the Krull house. She wondered if there had been another incident, but the silence of the shop reassured her.
‘You know as well as I do what’s happened in the last few days. Whenever anything unpleasant happens, they blame us. When a typhoid epidemic broke out and Joseph caught it like anyone else, the local women said he was the one who’d passed the disease on to everyone.’
Calmly, as if they were discussing business, he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another.
‘Because of what happened to that girl, people are again getting worked up against us.’
He blinked at the euphemism. What happened to that girl! She meant the attack at the edge of the canal, Sidonie strangled, stripped, raped, thrown in the water …
‘The inspector has received some anonymous letters. As long as they haven’t found the culprit, some people automatically think it’s one of us.’
Her voice was less steady now.
‘I realized that the first day. I foresaw everything that’s happened and will still happen. We had a quiet day yesterday, but it’ll start again and it’ll be worse.’
‘What did Joseph say?’
He had preferred to go straight on to the attack. Aunt Maria didn’t completely lose her composure, but it was clear it had hit home.
‘Joseph has nothing to do with that nasty business. I’m sure of it. He swore to me yesterday …’
So she, too, had suspected him! Which meant she had been dreading something like that from her son! Obviously, she knew him!
His eyes lowered, Hans was savouring his little victory, and Aunt Maria felt obliged to insist:
‘When I left the inspector, I was determined to set my mind at rest. Joseph may have his faults, but he’s never lied. I just have to look him in the eyes to know … What are you trying to say, Hans?’
Because he had just made a face.
‘Nothing, aunt!’
‘I repeat, Joseph didn’t do anything. Yes, there may be some evidence against him, but it’s precisely because he’s always been too upright, and perhaps because we brought him up too strictly.’
She sniffled, almost took her handkerchief from the pocket of her apron, but resisted, because it would have been almost an admission of defeat.
‘What evidence?’
‘Stupid things. Kids like that girl with the red hat who let their imagination run riot.’
‘I suppose she said Joseph was following Sidonie and her that evening at the fair.’
‘These girls always imagine men are following them. It doesn’t matter, Hans! What matters is what people think. The inspector knows how much credit to give malicious gossip like that.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘He told me so himself.’
‘Well, what I think is that he’s carrying out a thorough investigation.’
He almost went to fetch the morning paper and show his aunt the revealing item.
‘That’s neither here nor there!’ she insisted. ‘They can do all the investigating they want, they won’t find anything against Joseph, nothing of importance anyway. What scares me is the local people. They’ll make our lives unbearable … Unless …’
A silence. She had finally reached the culmination of this talk and suddenly she felt dizzy and rushed awkwardly towards the conclusion.
‘Since you have to leave anyway, you might as well go abroad straight away, to Germany or elsewhere. If you slip out of town quietly, they’re sure to suspect you …’
Her chest swelling with hope beneath her corset, she was looking at him with all her might, as if to cast a spell on him, to drag a ‘yes’ from him.
‘You have nothing to lose! Once across the border …’
So this was what she had been building towards! Hans, who wasn’t easily surprised, was nevertheless stunned. He admired his aunt, who had put together this whole speech just in order to say to him:
‘We could have you put in prison for fraud. You took advantage of Liesbeth. You’ve disrupted our house, but none of that matters if you agree to be the scapegoat and take suspicion away from Joseph!’
It made Joseph, for whom she had devised this plan, seem bigger somehow. And all this time he had been upstairs, by his open window, bent over his exercise books!
In the kitchen, Anna and Liesbeth were waiting.
‘I know these people, I’m sure they’ll leave us alone,’ she concluded in a muted voice, turning towards the window.
And the word people, which endlessly recurred in her speeches and in the conversations in the house, assumed a particular resonance among the Krulls, an almost fearsome significance. People meant the rest of mankind, the living ocean that surrounded the island of the family. It began with the Guérins and extended to the limits of the world.
‘People will leave us alone …’
In other words, the storm would move away with Hans …
‘What exactly did Joseph tell you, aunt?’
He was no longer the accused. He no longer needed to brazen it out. On the contrary, it was he who now asked the questions in an incisive tone.
‘Look, Hans …’
His aunt pointed beyond the tulle curtain, out to the quayside and the lock where the idle bargees seemed quite agitated again. Among them, the vulgar figure of Pipi could be seen, holding forth. It was as if they could hear her voice. They guessed that she was telling a new audience all about her daughter. From time to time she would stretch her arm out in the direction of the Krull house.
‘I can see.’
‘They’ll even end up blaming us for the fact that the canal’s been shut down! Whereas if you leave …’
‘What did Joseph confess to you?’
‘Why should he have confessed anything?’
‘Because he cried, because he threw himself on his knees in front of you then, I ass
ume, had a fit of hysterics and lay down on his bed.’
She said nothing.
‘He knew Sidonie, didn’t he?’
‘He’d spoken to her twice in the street. It was her friend who told the inspector. She says they both made fun of him because he was awkward around women.’
‘And that night?’
‘What’s the matter, Hans? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Because I want to know!’
‘Do you think—?’
‘I don’t think anything! I know Joseph isn’t a man like any other. I have an idea what he got up to in the street at night. Before this thing happened, he used to go out every night, didn’t he?’
‘He went out for air!’
‘And he didn’t have any friends, not even at the university.’
‘Because he’s always shunned for being German!’
‘He didn’t have a girlfriend either.’
‘He’s too shy …’
She was answering reluctantly and felt angry with herself for doing so. He remained seated in a nonchalant pose on the corner of the table, creasing an embroidered doily.
‘What else did he tell you?’
‘Nothing, I assure you … Why must you insist?’
She was looking at the door, the ceiling. You might have thought she was going to call her son to the rescue.
‘You have to understand, aunt, that I’m no idiot. We were together when we passed a couple embracing under a street-lamp, and I saw him. His hands started shaking. For a while, he couldn’t speak. And it has the same effect on him when he walks behind a woman who’s probably almost naked under her dress, or looks up at a window and sees a woman’s silhouette behind the blind … I had a friend, in Germany—’
‘Be quiet, Hans!’
‘With this friend, it was the sight of a leg. And until he was finally able to—’
‘Hans!’
‘I bet Joseph hid in dark corners to watch couples kissing …’
She had to sit down, and this time she did take her handkerchief from her pocket, but only to mop her brow.
‘He didn’t kill her,’ she said. ‘He swore to me—’
‘Then why is he so scared?’
She gave him a long look that was in no way like those that had preceded it. She was pretty much defeated. She seemed to be asking him:
‘Can I trust you?’
Because the unlikeliest thing was happening: Aunt Maria, mistrust incarnate, was falling under Hans’ influence.
‘He told me everything,’ she stammered at last. ‘He did follow her. He wanted to talk to her again, but without her friend, who made fun of him. He admitted to me that he was attracted by the girl because, like him, she was tubercular …’
Hans was listening, as solemn as a doctor.
‘It wasn’t until they got to the quayside that he noticed someone else was following her, a stocky man in a felt hat …’
‘Go on, aunt!’
She had to break off to cry a little, out of weariness even more than because she was upset. She looked up at him imploringly.
‘Why do you want—’
‘What did he see?’
‘It’s my fault! If I’d let him go with girls, like any other man, it wouldn’t have happened. But I was only thinking of his health! When he was small, he couldn’t adapt to things. At school he was always ill and—’
‘He hid, didn’t he?’
‘The man had accosted the girl and was talking to her. Apparently at first she didn’t seem to be pushing him away, then she went right to the edge of the canal with him. It was near a pile of bricks that’s still there. They kissed. The man became more forward, and the girl struggled …’
What words had Joseph used to describe this scene to his mother?
‘They both rolled on the ground … He didn’t see him strangle her. He thought …’
‘And he stayed to the end?’
‘By the time he realized, it was too late, and the man was dragging the body to the canal. Joseph didn’t see his face. According to him, he looked like a vagrant. He was dressed like the tramps you see wandering the countryside.’
‘What about the anonymous letters?’
‘It’s the same old story. Girls telling their parents Joseph followed them, or had spoken to them. You could say the same of all the young men. If Joseph admits to the police that he was there … Hans! You’ve already done us a lot of harm. My poor Liesbeth, from now on …’
She wept a little more.
And speaking into her handkerchief, which distorted her voice:
‘You have to save Joseph. You have to, do you hear? You have to leave here, so that people will stop bothering us.’
For a moment he thought Aunt Maria was going to get down on her knees, as Joseph had done the previous day.
Just then, a bargee in clogs clumped into the shop.
9.
How had Maria Krull known that those steps were not the honest steps of a customer but that they constituted a threat? It had only taken a few stomps of the man’s clogs on the floor for her to abandon one drama for another and listen out carefully. Her gaze became sharper, and she forgot about Hans; in her mind she was already running towards the shop, and now her body followed her mind. Hans was never to forget that image of her, as heavy and definitive as a photograph in a family album: she had reached the kitchen and was standing against one half of the glass door. This door had a thin curtain over it, and the light made a halo around her grey hair, while her face was more moulded, firmer against the light.
The other half of the door was ajar, and Aunt Maria, head bent, was watching the enemy, ready to rush to Anna’s rescue.
The man was a bargee they had seen a few moments earlier move away from the group being stirred up by Pipi. Already at the school in his village he must have been a braggart, always looking for applause and laughter, defying the teacher like a proud idiot.
‘You’ll see!’ he had said to them, his moustache damp, his eyes gleaming.
And as he crossed the central reservation, he was all puffed up from knowing they were watching him and turned from time to time to make sure, making a little sign as if to say to the gallery:
‘Don’t worry! You’ll see!’
But as he got closer to the shop he slowed down, so that he came in more or less at the speed of an ordinary customer.
Anna was behind the counter. Liesbeth was in a corner of the shop, in order not to remain alone in the kitchen or in her room. Both were pale, anxiety written all over their faces.
‘What can I get you?’ Anna nevertheless asked, suspecting nothing.
She was surprised to see the policeman, who usually stayed fifty or a hundred metres away, come and stand just outside the window and look through it.
‘A Pernod!’
Anna looked among the bottles. It was then that Aunt Maria took up her position behind the door.
His drink served, the gleaming idiot grabbed it, gave Anna a mocking look, flung the liquid across the shop and put the glass back down on the counter.
He was pleased! He looked Anna in the eyes, proud of himself for challenging a young woman, wiped his moustache and at last said:
‘I don’t feel like drinking in a murderer’s house!’
Anna automatically turned her head to the kitchen and saw her mother in the doorway. Did the man also see her? Whether he did or not, he headed for the shop door. Just outside, the policeman hesitated, then merely said:
‘Be on your way. We don’t want trouble.’
At what point had Hans gone upstairs? It was hard to be sure. He always came and went without making a noise, without stirring the air. Realizing that he wasn’t in the kitchen or the lounge, Maria Krull went to the foot of the stairs and heard him quietly turning the handle of Joseph’s door.
Hans wasn’t deliberately trying to surprise anyone. The door didn’t creak. His soles came to rest silently on the floor.
It was he who was su
rprised at the silence in the room. For a moment he took it for emptiness. On the table by the window, an exercise book lay open beside a bottle of green ink and a pen holder with a chewed end. But there was nobody on the chair, nobody in this part of the room, where the green trees outside were reflected in the mirrored wardrobe and the hands of a black marble clock had been frozen for ages at ten to twelve.
Joseph was there, though, lying fully clothed on his bed, looking taller than ever, his big feet in yellow slippers. One of his hands was dangling to the floor, to the rug with the red background, his mouth was open, and his breathing was regular.
It was the only corner of the house with a male smell, a smell of sweat and cold tobacco. As he passed, Hans glanced automatically at the exercise book, its pages covered in Joseph’s small handwriting. A title was written in a rounded hand:
Anatomical type: lesions
But there was as yet nothing below it, just finger marks, worn paper over which a man must have sat for a long time, stubbornly, thinking about something else. In the margin, Joseph had finally written, in pencil, in different handwriting: It might be enough to slap a policeman in the street, or lie without blushing, or …
It ended with a drawing that depicted nothing, one of those complicated doodles you draw when your mind is elsewhere.
Then he had gone and laid his dismal body on the bed without removing the counterpane. Had he slept much during the last few nights? Probably not. But now sleep had finally taken him, a heavy diurnal sleep. His white shirt, open at the neck, was wet.
There was a chair near the bedside table and Hans sat down on it and gazed at his cousin. He didn’t move. He made no sound and yet, from deep in his numb sleep, Joseph was aware of an alien presence and he came slowly back to the surface, a shudder ran over his damp skin, his Adam’s apple moved up and down, and at last sight filtered through his eyelashes.
When he recognized Hans, he made an effort to wake more quickly, rubbing his face with his hands.
‘What do you want?’ he asked in a thick voice.
Hans smiled unwittingly. It wasn’t a smile, strictly speaking, but something very light, a touch of pity, a very small touch of irony.
The Krull House Page 12
