by René Appel
* * *
I was born over there, in the Dapperstraat. Over the years, I moved around the area and eventually landed here, on the fourth floor of a stately building on the east side of the park. I spend most of my time in an armchair just inside my living room window, looking out onto the park. Most of the city’s sounds fail to reach this high, and I content myself with observing the silent stories of the world outside my window. Some things are better without sound. Even violence seems peaceful when wreathed in silence. I have witnessed robberies and drunken brawls that suggest contemporary ballet, the dancers wheeling around each other with exaggerated, expressive movements. From my vantage point, these events are almost beautiful.
* * *
I don’t have many friends. Just one, really. His name is Ruud. He’s absurdly fat and always in a bad mood. He doesn’t walk—probably because of his weight—but putters around in a motorized wheelchair. I have no idea why we’re friends. Perhaps we’re both lonely, who can say? We see each other almost every day in the library in the Linnaeusstraat. I read the newspaper, and Ruud asks me what’s in it, and then he curses the world while we drink free coffee from plastic cups.
A few months ago, Ruud asked me how long I plan to stay on in the house on the park. “You’re old,” he said, meaning maybe it was time for me to start looking for a place in a rest home. But I’m not planning on moving, and I told him so. “You’ll die there, then?” he growled, and I said yes, that is indeed my plan, not necessarily right away but eventually. At which point Ruud felt compelled to tell me yet again about his neighbor, a hoarder who tripped over a pile of junk, fell down the stairs, and broke his neck. When the police searched his apartment, they found his dog half-dead, with—so the story went—its decomposing body melting into the carpet. “They had to carry the poor thing out of the house, rug and all. Finally had to put him to sleep.”
“I’m not a hoarder,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” Ruud hissed between his teeth. “You’re too old to go on living there. One of these days you’ll break your hip or something, and you’ll be too weak to call for help, and then you’ll die up there, and your body will rot away and start to stink. Everyone else in the building will suffer, just because you’re too stubborn to go to an old folks’ home where you belong.”
“It won’t take them long to find me,” I shushed him. “You’ll miss me, won’t you?”
“You wish,” he muttered, then ordered me to go on reading from the paper.
* * *
To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me if I die alone in my apartment. I’m used to being alone. It would be strange to be surrounded by people when my time comes, to see Ruud’s fat face before me as I take my final breath. I don’t even want to think about it. No, I’m accustomed to my own company, and the prospect of dying alone doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I only hope my death is painless. Violence frightens me—even the thought of it makes me nauseous.
* * *
I clearly remember that conversation with Ruud, because it happened the same day the walls of my house began to speak. I’d been reading in bed, and at the moment I closed my book and reached to turn out the light, I heard it. The voice was soft but audible, right beside my face. A vague whisper. I listened, holding my breath. It was a woman’s voice, and though I couldn’t understand what she was saying, I could tell that she was unhappy. The experience made me quite nervous, but after a few minutes the voice faded away and I drifted off to sleep.
A curious thing about this type of old structure is that you can’t really predict how sound will travel. I didn’t recognize the voice that came from within my walls. It might have been someone living two doors away, or on the ground floor, three flights below me. Or it might have come from the third floor, where the building’s new owner lived with his wife. He was a lawyer who’d bought the house a few months earlier in the hopes of increasing his income. I watched him go out the front door every morning in a gray or dark-blue suit. A man of routine, who returned home each evening promptly at a quarter past six. His wife didn’t work. She was a quiet woman with a pale face, not unfriendly.
The owner was almost as insistent as Ruud in his attempts to convince me to move out. He even offered me a sum of money to leave. He wanted to renovate my apartment, I knew, so he could offer it at a much higher rent to expats or some other wealthy sort. But I’m not leaving, and I politely told him so, even though that means I’ll go on having to mount a discouraging number of steps to reach my nest. I don’t want to leave this house, because I know it inside and out. The stairs are very steep, yet I know which ones will creak when I step on them. I know where the handrail is loose and how the front door sticks in the winter, how you have to give it a bit of a push before it will open. And although I don’t know all of the residents, I do know the building’s idiosyncracies . . . and that’s a sort of love, isn’t it? Yes, I love this house, and in a way I believe the house cares for me too.
* * *
Looking out the window one day, I saw the owner approaching. I glanced at the clock on the church tower farther up the street: it was only three in the afternoon.
Without undue haste, he chained his bicycle to the fence on the other side of the road. There was a noticeable calmness in his movements. Something in the way he checked to make sure it was safe to cross—too in control. A hint of pent-up anger. I stepped away from the window and stood in the middle of the living room, listening for any sound from below. I heard him open the front door and quietly lock it behind him. As his footsteps ascended the stairs, I had a growing sense of discomfort. It was the middle of the week, a workday. At this time, the building was deserted, except for the owner and his wife. And me, above them. He’d probably forgotten all about me.
Involuntarily, I held my breath. The ticking of the clock on the windowsill sliced the air. Then, without warning, a storm of violence burst out beneath my feet. The owner roared as I’d never heard before. Furniture crashed, some glass object shattered against a wall. The wife’s sobbing pleas seemed to come from every direction. They leaked through the cracks in the windowpanes, crept through the mouse holes, climbed the walls, and oozed into my apartment and filled it, bouncing off me as I stood in the middle of my living room, my hands over my face, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. When the crying stopped, the hitting continued, and I slowly dropped my hands to my sides. Bang bang bang, I heard, and I wondered what the woman’s silence meant.
Perhaps the scene below was less violent than it sounded? Or perhaps he had knocked her unconscious? And then, in a sudden insight I couldn’t wish away, I realized that she might no longer be crying because she was dead. Perhaps I—hiding behind my hands like a coward on the building’s top floor—had overheard the murder of the quiet woman with the pale face.
* * *
The next day, I told Ruud that the owner of my building had beaten his wife, that I’d been afraid I’d been a witness to her death—but that later, thank God, I’d heard her scurrying around below. I was concerned, I said, that at any moment the situation could take a turn for the worse.
He shrugged. “She’s the one who’s chosen to stay with him,” he said.
I don’t really like Ruud, although I call him my friend. But his words contained a grain of truth: if the woman wanted to leave, she’d be gone by now. And what, I asked myself, could an old-timer like me possibly do to help her, anyway? How could I protect her from a husband decades my junior? And what if he found out she and I had spoken—wouldn’t that make him even angrier? What if, because of my interference, he did something even more violent than he’d already done?
I worried about so many facets of the situation that once again I wound up taking no action.
And then one evening I woke up in the middle of the night. I lay still in my bed, my eyes closed, asking myself what it was that had awakened me. A few minutes passed, and then I heard her voice. It was very soft, a whisper from the depths, each word seeming
to erase the one that came before it. I slid out from beneath my blanket and quietly got to my feet. I followed the sound to the living room, then into the hallway. I paused a moment inside my door, leaned against the wooden frame, and tensed in order to better capture the faint whispering from downstairs. It was so hushed that it would have been easy to ignore. I cautiously unlocked my door, careful to make no noise, and peered out into the stairwell. It was pitch-black except for a narrow strip of light that came through the window in the front door down on the ground floor. I pushed my own door open a bit wider and inched my head through the crack. My attention was drawn to a movement one floor below me. It took another second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then I realized that it was the owner’s wife. She was lying on her stomach, crawling on hands and knees up the stairs toward me. She seemed to be pulling herself upward with her arms, as if her legs were no longer working. Her hair stuck to her face in wet stripes. She breathed heavily but almost without sound, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. Then she apparently became aware of something behind her and stiffened, just for an instant. Her features froze in an icy fear that crackled through her, and I suddenly saw that her hair wasn’t wet but drenched with blood. It streamed from her hairline, trickled down her face, pooled at the bottoms of her eyes. She couldn’t see me, I knew. She shivered and sighed, her fingers clawing the steps to pull her more quickly upward.
And that’s when I saw him. He was leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest, watching her in utter silence. Then he leaned forward and, without a word, grabbed her by the ankles. He dragged her down the stairs and, in continued silence, back into their apartment. Her eyes and mouth gaped wide open, but still she made no sound. Just before she disappeared from my sight, it seemed as if she stared straight up into my face. He shut the door noiselessly, and the quiet of the night was absolute, as if it had swallowed her whole.
* * *
The next few days, I was immersed in a somberness inappropriate to a person of my years. For some time, I had observed my surroundings with a sort of lighthearted resignation, and I was quite satisfied with that attitude. But now this darkness, this violence, had penetrated my walls. I sat in my armchair for long hours and watched the crowns of the tallest trees swaying gently in the wind. I remembered how, only a few months earlier, the older ones had been cut down, had vanished from the park after living there for decades and had quickly been forgotten, and how their disappearance had offered light and air to those that remained. This park, I thought, just like this house, just like this city I know so well . . . everything changes, but at heart it remains the same.
Everything is irreplaceably what it is. Nothing yields. Nothing bends to the world’s violence.
* * *
The following day, I waited for the owner’s wife. Each time I heard the front door open, I hurried to the stairwell to see who it was. The third time, it was her. She was coming up the stairs, a blue-and-white shopping bag in her hand. I started down, holding carefully to the railing. Although I moved as quickly as my tired legs permitted, she reached her apartment door before me. She glanced up at me for a moment, surprised, and offered me a slight nod as she slid her key in the lock.
“Ma’am?” I said, inwardly cursing my old bones for not being faster.
She hesitated, visibly reluctant, the knob in her hand. “Yes?”
A few steep steps still separated us. It seemed to take an eternity before I reached her, but fortunately she waited. When I finally got there, I had to catch my breath. I leaned a hand against the wall, held up the other in a gesture that pleaded with her to grant me a moment to compose myself.
“Yes?” she said again, and she sounded irritated. Much of her face was concealed by large sunglasses, which I expected her to remove now that she was indoors, now that we stood side by side. But she kept them on and wore no visible expression. Her skin was as pale as I remembered, her lips pressed tightly together, leaving no room for emotion.
“Is your husband home?” I asked when I was able to speak.
She shook her head and turned to go inside.
“No, wait, it doesn’t matter. I mean—I actually wanted to talk to you.”
She seemed distracted. I got the strange feeling that she anticipated I would strike her.
“I wanted to tell you that I know. I know what he does to you. Is there anything I can do to help?”
Her mouth opened very slightly, but she promptly closed it again. I still couldn’t read her expression. She swallowed and said, “He can’t help it. It’s his heart.”
“He has a heart condition?”
She nodded. “He takes medication, and it has side effects. Sometimes . . . sometimes he’s not himself.”
“Why don’t you leave him?”
She lowered her head and whispered, “I don’t dare.”
“But you want to?”
She nodded without saying anything, then turned away from me abruptly, as if shocked by her own response.
* * *
After that conversation, I was determined to help her. I had done nothing in my life for which I needed to be embarrassed, but also nothing to be proud of. This, as I neared my finish line, would be my gift to the world. I devised a plan, and practiced the appropriate expressions of hysteria before the mirror. It wouldn’t be easy, but I hadn’t felt so keyed up in years.
* * *
The next day was a Saturday. It was ten minutes to six in the morning. I sat on the edge of my bed in pajamas and robe. I stood up and took off the robe, examined myself in the hall mirror, then went back to my bedroom and put it back on. Between the trees, the park outside was a dark gray. It wouldn’t be long before the light would shift and daybreak would come. I checked the clock on the windowsill. Eight minutes to six. The owner would be fast asleep. It was time to act.
I picked up the telephone receiver and waited for the trembling of my hand to subside. Then I dialed his number. It was awhile before he answered, his voice hoarse with sleep. “Hello?”
I took a deep breath and screamed, as loudly and hysterically as I could, trusting that, newly awakened, he wouldn’t recognize the sound as rehearsed: “Rats! Rats! There are rats in my apartment! You have to come up!”
“What? What are you . . . do you know what time it is?”
“They’re in the attic! I can hear them scuttling around all night long, and now they’re in the walls! I’m scared!”
“Can’t it wait? It’s—”
“No! No, it can’t wait! Please come now, I can’t stand it!”
“All right, calm down. I’m on my way. Jesus!”
He hung up. I set down the phone and waited, shaking with excitement, until I heard his apartment door open below. I took a breath and burst out into the stairwell with all the emotion I could muster. “There must be five or six of them!” I screamed at him, while he was still climbing the flight of stairs between us. He looked at me with irritation tinged with suspicion. I must have appeared crazy, with my white hair sticking out in all directions, my wrinkled pajamas, my unkempt robe hanging off my shoulders. “It’s horrible! Disgusting! I’ve always been terrified of rats. And now they’re in the ceiling. I can hear their nails scratching the wood, they probably have a nest of babies by now. The filthy beasts must be everywhere, and they eat everything. What do I do if they come into my apartment? What do I do?!”
“Calm down!” he ordered, and for one moment I thought he was about to hit me in the face. He didn’t, but he studied me with unconcealed contempt. “I can’t think if you keep on like that.” He went on staring at me, and I realized that, in addition to contempt, there was also a certain interest glimmering in his gaze. He surely believed I had gone mad. Alzheimer’s, if he was lucky. Then he’d have no trouble getting me out of the building.
I lowered my voice a bit. “Please, can you look in the attic? I’ll never get any sleep.”
He glanced up at the ceiling above the stairwell.
“Th
ere’s a hatch,” I said.
“I know,” he sighed, and he reached for its metal handle. When he pulled on it, flakes of white paint and clouds of dust rained down on us. The hatch, I knew, hadn’t been opened in years. The folding aluminum ladder above it was a cheap model. The previous owner hadn’t wanted to spend a lot of money on a mechanism that would rarely, if ever, be used. It rattled coldly as it unfolded. When it was fully extended, it left little room for us on the landing. Its feet settled barely two inches from the topmost step of the stairwell. It was an unsteady contraption he would have to climb, thanks to the fears of a hysterical tenant, so early in the morning that he hadn’t yet taken his medication.
I watched him furtively as he leaned one hand against the wall, the other pressed to his chest. He was panting, just a little. I was so close beside him that there was no need to shout, but I did so all the same. “Do you hear that? Do you? Rats!” I shoved him roughly, and he jerked away from my touch.
“Jesus, would you calm the fuck down?” Any vestige of politeness was gone now, and he stared at me in fury. “If you don’t relax, there’s nothing I can do.”
“Sorry,” I gasped, trying to look frightened.
He shook his head and examined the ladder. He raised a foot to the bottom tread and tested its strength. “Wobbly,” he muttered. “Hold it steady, would you?”
I ducked beneath the ladder and grabbed onto it with both hands. The owner groaned a bit and slowly began to climb. He was so close to me now that I feared he would hear my heart pulsing against my ribs. I had to wait for the exact right moment—this was what it all came down to. He had to be as high as possible, to make his fall as long as possible.
