‘Hey, Marcel! Shall we go and have dinner?’
Or else, in a high-pitched voice:
‘Émile! Émile! Your mother’s calling you!’
But people didn’t retreat when the uniformed officers advanced towards them. Some now had a harder expression on their faces. Pipi, feeling supported, raised her fists, attaining a degree of pathos in her drunken state.
‘He’d been following her for weeeks,’ she said, genuinely in tears. ‘The poor girl didn’t want anything to do with him, even if he was a doctor. He offered her money … In that house, all that matters is money … When he saw there was nothing doing, he attacked her by the canal and strangled her.’
A woman dabbed at her eyes. Pipi looked at her audience, spotted a red hat near the back row and called out:
‘Come here, Germaine! Tell them what you know. Tell them about that evening when he kept following the two of you.’
She hadn’t prepared any of this. Drunkenness gave Pipi the instincts of an actress. She stooped and clasped the girl with the big breasts and big buttocks in her arms. This started the girl crying, too.
‘Come on now, calm down, both of you,’ the sergeant said in a conciliatory tone.
But the others now turned against him.
‘Shut up!’ someone cried.
‘Down with the cops!’ someone else cried from the back row.
Without being aware of it, Monsieur Schoof had lit his meerschaum pipe and stretched his short legs as he usually did. He repeated with gentle stubbornness:
‘I don’t understand how you could have kept that young man.’
Nervously, Joseph cracked his fingers as he pulled on them and implored Marguerite:
‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, Joseph! If you’re upset, I’m the one you should tell.’
Even though she could hear voices from outside, she didn’t understand!
‘What are they saying?’ she asked. ‘Who are they angry with?’
Upstairs, Aunt Maria and Hans were still standing side by side, stock still, ears pricked …
‘What are they waiting for? Why don’t they arrest them?’
‘Who?’ asked someone who had just arrived.
‘The murderer!’
‘What murderer?’
‘Sidonie’s murderer!’
Hearing her daughter’s name, Pipi involuntarily burst into tears and threw herself on the ground in a fit of despair.
‘My little girl … My little girl …’ she stammered. ‘Someone give her back to me! Someone give me back my little girl, my angel …’
Some of the onlookers were sniffling. Most of them didn’t know the woman was drunk.
‘Get up …’ the sergeant begged her. ‘Please get up …’
But he was given such angry looks that he didn’t dare insist.
The young policeman came back from telephoning and announced:
‘He’s on his way!’
Beyond the dark-green foliage of the trees, the sky was beginning to darken, turning red before attaining the purple of a summer evening.
The locals who at this hour were in the habit of strolling by the canal for a little fresh air approached timidly, especially those who had children and who formed small groups some thirty or forty metres away.
‘Come here, Jojo! I forbid you …’
There were loving couples.
‘Let’s go,’ he would say.
And she would reply:
‘Just another minute …’
To see if something was finally going to happen!
‘Who are they?’
‘Germans …’
‘What have they done?’
‘Apparently they killed a girl …’
The most telling thing was what the carpenter next door did. Presumably thinking that his own house was as exposed as the Krulls’, he, too, closed his shutters.
The people in the back rows were joking. Some were only there because others were and they got up on tiptoe, apologizing to those they jostled.
Others, around Pipi, were starting to mutter angrily, especially when Louise’s husband, who had been released, came and planted himself in front of the sergeant.
‘Going to arrest me again, are you? Are you working for the Germans, too?’
Those were the words that recurred most frequently: ‘the Germans!’ Some people, on arriving, heard only those syllables.
And now, for no specific reason, the crowd pressed forwards, perhaps simply because someone had lost balance.
‘Move back! Move back!’ cried the sergeant, holding the two officers by the hand to form a barrier.
‘Move back yourself!’ retorted the huge bargee.
The policemen, pushed back by the crowd, thudded against the shutters, and under the impact the last shards came loose from the broken windowpanes, releasing a shower of glass into the shop.
‘I think we’d better go!’ Monsieur Schoof said, getting to his feet.
To which Cornelius responded, like an echo:
‘I think so.’
The kitchen was in semi-darkness now. Anna wiped her eyes. Her father, still motionless, seemed to fade gradually into the gloom.
12.
There were absurd little touches. For example, when Maria Krull returned, preoccupied, to the kitchen and saw Monsieur Schoof getting to his feet, her face automatically took on another expression, the expression of a hostess, and she said in polite surprise:
‘Leaving already?’
It was only a reflex, and immediately afterwards she was back to the way she had been before, the way the others were, looking around her, brow furrowed with the effort of focusing her mind, anxious to know what was going on.
‘Has Marguerite gone?’
Because the most curious thing was how lost they were.
All the doors were open, like lock gates, between the different parts of the house. The air was circulating freely. They passed without seeing each other. A moment earlier, Anna had been in the kitchen and now she wasn’t. And where was Joseph? Everyone was drifting in and out, apart from the two old men rooted in the kitchen.
But now Monsieur Schoof was on his feet, looking for his hat and calling:
‘Marguerite!’
She was coming! She was in the lounge, standing by Joseph, who kept clenching his teeth with impatience. For the last five minutes, gently, stupidly, she had been trying to worm information out of him.
‘What did he do? Why won’t anyone tell me?’
Because she put everything that was happening down to Hans! She had never been so pink, an improbable pink so reminiscent of a cow’s udders that you expected to see her giving milk!
‘I’m coming, Daddy … Good night, Joseph. Promise me you’ll keep calm.’
She gave him her slightly blotchy cheeks to kiss, then rushed out of the lounge with feigned breeziness.
‘Where’s Liesbeth? Liesbeth! Come and say goodbye to Monsieur Schoof.’
Had everybody taken their leave? In the end, the pace quickened. Monsieur Schoof moved towards the door. Aunt Maria was already turning the key and listening.
‘Be quick,’ she said in a low voice.
They squeezed through. Their appearance in the doorway was greeted with a whistle from a boy of fifteen in one of the last rows, who had stuck four fingers in his mouth. The shrill sound had the same effect as the policeman’s whistle. It caused a riot. Immediately, other whistles rang out. One whole section of the crowd took it up, for fun, just to hear themselves, while Monsieur Schoof, holding Marguerite by the hand, slipped past the houses.
Some people, who had only stayed out of idleness, thought it was over, especially as some failed attempts at whistling provoked bursts of laughter. But that was in the back rows. In the front rows, people were pressing around Pipi, who was recounting her misfortunes, and even those who knew her ended up feeling sorry for her this evening.
Somewhere near the tram rails, the wife of a bargee was explaining to people
who weren’t from the canal:
‘They even charge us five centimes more for sugar! Those people take advantage of the fact that we can’t always pay cash.’
It was true. All the merchandise in the Krulls’ shop was a little more expensive than anywhere else. But how many accounts recorded in the big black notebook were still unpaid?
‘Once, they lent money to the master of the Belle Hélène and, when he couldn’t pay it back, they got the bailiffs in.’
Nobody paid any attention to who was leaving and who was coming. In fact, most of those leaving were respectable middle-class people from the surrounding area, who had seen something in passing or while taking their evening constitutional.
In their place, young men appeared, especially young men in caps who deliberately acted tough and looked around them insolently.
One of these thought he spotted a silhouette behind a curtain on the first floor.
‘There! Aim at the brother!’
He picked up a brick, threw it and hit the window full on. Hans just had time to move out of the way.
This was a signal. The pile of bricks was quite close. Other hooligans went to fetch them and flung them haphazardly at the upper floor. Many of the bricks fell back on to the pavement, and people had to move out of the way.
A tram rang its bell in vain for two minutes as it tried to make its way through the crowd, which, as if by magic, had become more dense. The policemen had red brick dust on their tunics.
And the whistles started up again, even more forcefully than before, when they saw four policemen arrive on bicycles, followed by the inspector, who was still wearing his boater.
‘Kill the Kraut!’ they cried. ‘Kill the murderer!’
It was exciting to throw bricks at that façade, behind which nothing could be seen. Some fell into the rooms on the first floor.
A voice said:
‘Who knows? They’re quite capable of shooting at us!’
Others heard only the last words:
‘Careful, they’re going to shoot at us!’
They thought they glimpsed shadowy figures behind the broken windows. For a long time they took as a target a curtain quivering in the breeze, behind which they assumed there was an enemy.
Mopping his brow, the inspector got up on the doorstep and tried to obtain silence in order to speak to the crowd. A fragment of brick knocked his straw hat off, which provoked a mixture of laughter and jeers.
As in a fire, the excitement would diminish in one sector, die down completely, only to flare up somewhere else.
Beyond the roadway, the central reservation was deserted apart from a man sitting on a bench. It was Potut, wrapped in his thick overcoat, his hands in his pockets, an unlit pipe planted in his beard. He was watching, placid and indifferent.
And now people were arriving in groups, in gangs, from the working-class neighbourhoods. These, as soon as they arrived, were bolder and more aggressive.
‘Down with the cops!’
The neighbours, stunned by what had happened, realized that things were becoming serious. They kept a cautious distance. They had put their children to bed, and from time to time they would move closer, casting worried glances, wondering where it was all going to end.
‘It’s their fault, too! They’ve always refused to be like everyone else!’
From a nearby house, the inspector was phoning in vain to the prosecutor, the examining magistrate, the town hall. Everyone was in the country!
He next turned to the gendarmerie and called it to the rescue.
‘Yes … Send men … As many as you can … Until then, I can’t be held responsible.’
Bad-tempered voices were crying:
‘What are they waiting for? Why don’t they arrest him?’
Cornelius was still sitting alone in his armchair in the now completely dark kitchen. Occasionally someone would come in and go out again, barely recognizable from the rustle of a dress, the sound of footsteps.
Joseph was still in the lounge. Protected by the shutters, he was listening, pale-faced, wild-eyed.
Two or three times, his mother had joined him and put her hand on his shoulder.
‘They won’t dare … The police are there …’
But he was barely capable of answering her. He looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her, or didn’t hear her. He was shaking. His whole body was in a state of panic, his nerves had given way abruptly.
‘It’s late. People will go to sleep in the end.’
Why did Joseph think the crowd was going to set fire to the house? It was a vision he had had. He had imagined flames passing in front of his eyes, had seen himself running in all directions in the inferno and finding no way out.
‘Keep calm.’
Where was she going? Why were people constantly going up and down the stairs? And when they passed, they pretended not to see each other!
The bricks were hitting the front of the house at a less rapid pace now, but the people outside had already moved on to something else. Dozens of voices were chanting in unison, as if under the direction of an orchestra conductor:
‘The-mur-der-er! … The-mur-der-er! … The-mur-der-er! …’
‘Gentlemen!’ the inspector made an effort to yell, standing on tiptoe.
‘The-mur-der-er!’
‘Gentlemen!’
He received something dirty full in the face: a cloth, a soft, damp object that must have been picked up from the gutter.
‘The-mur-der-er! … The-mur-der-er!’
The chorus was growing louder, the rhythm more pronounced.
‘I have to talk to them from the window,’ the inspector said to his sergeant.
Crossing the pavement, which was strewn with bricks, he knocked at the door.
That was another mistake. The voices became more urgent.
‘In the name of the law …’
‘Mother!’ Anna, who was in the shop, called out.
She thought her mother was far away, perhaps upstairs, and now she heard her skirt, quite close by. Bending by the door, Maria Krull asked:
‘Who is it?’
‘The inspector.’
The others were still yelling.
‘Listen, inspector,’ she said in a measured tone. ‘If I open the door, the crowd will come in. You should go through the house next door.’
He had presumably understood, because they didn’t hear any more from him. But they did hear jeering, as well as more whistling. The noise was turning nastier.
It was because the gendarmes had just arrived and were advancing threateningly. There was jostling, and blows were exchanged in the front rows. The people in the other rows were pushed back several metres and found themselves jammed up against the trams, of which there was already quite a queue.
Occasionally, like a rocket going higher in a firework display, there came an isolated cry:
‘Kill him!’
Meanwhile, Maria Krull stopped by her husband’s armchair and said in a low voice:
‘You should go to bed, Father!’
Only his face and beard could be seen. He nodded and said:
‘I will.’
But he didn’t move.
Liesbeth was on her knees in her parents’ bedroom, praying to a large ebony crucifix.
Hans was wandering about. Nobody now seemed to hear him or even suspect his existence. It was he, looking out of a window on the landing, who was the first to see the inspector in the neighbouring garden. The carpenter, who was also there, placed a ladder against the wall, and the inspector climbed it and called out:
‘Is there anyone in there!’
Hans made to go. In the corridor, he bumped into his aunt, who ordered:
‘Leave it.’
A moment later, the inspector came into the house, right in front of Aunt Maria, and looked around him with even more suspicion than during the afternoon, as if afraid of the slightest patch of shadow.
‘Where is he?’
‘In the loun
ge.’
‘I think it’s best if I arrest him provisionally. I haven’t found anyone to give me instructions. If I leave him here, the crowd will end up forcing the doors.’
He didn’t feel sorry for them. Right now, he shared the crowd’s hostility towards the Krulls and its disgust for Joseph.
Outside, a gendarme who didn’t know the situation had manhandled Pipi, and that had provoked renewed anger.
‘I’m going upstairs to talk to them.’
Maria Krull went up behind him, her steps so muffled that she seemed like his shadow. Passing an open door, they saw Liesbeth on her knees, then brushed against Anna, who was standing against a doorpost.
‘I think I should put my scarf on. Fortunately, I always have it on me.’
He groped his way in the semi-darkness, took a deep breath and rushed to the window, where he emerged like a puppet, making feverish gestures with his too short arms.
‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen! I demand silence!’
But all he obtained was laughter, followed by a shower of missiles, some of which even ended up on the landing.
‘I’m about to arrest Joseph Krull! I ask you to remain calm!’
He didn’t know what to say, terrified by the magnitude of the spectacle in front of his eyes, the long line of yellow trams trapped in the crowd, all those faces raised towards him.
‘Once Joseph Krull has been arrested, you can all go home.’
Surprisingly, there was a moment of silence, of hesitation, and he took advantage of it to withdraw. But he hadn’t reached the foot of the stairs, still followed by Maria Krull, when the cry again went up:
‘Kill him! Kill him!’
He no longer knew what to do, lost control of his nerves and caught himself saying:
‘This is all your fault! Where is he?’
Joseph was there, standing in front of him.
‘I’m arresting you without arresting you. The reason I’m taking you to prison, even though I don’t have a warrant, is because it’s the only way to pacify the crowd.’
Joseph said nothing. His Adam’s apple was moving. His fingers were almost tangled. Mechanically, he followed the inspector into the shop, but there, by the door, which was again being shoved from outside, he was able finally to whisper:
The Krull House Page 17
