by Roland Topor
He took off one of his shoes and hurled it across the room. The angry gesture relieved him.
Someone rapped on the wall.
“All right!” he shouted. “I know I’m making too much noise! But you should have rapped while this was going on, not now!”
He made an effort to control himself. “It’s not their fault, after all. And besides, perhaps they did rap while it was going on.”
What should he do? Make a complaint? Yes, that was it; he would go and make a complaint at the police station. He looked at his watch: it was seven o’clock. Would the police station be open now? The best thing to do was to go and see. He put on his shoe again and started down the staircase. He met Monsieur Zy on the ground floor landing.
“You’ve disturbed everyone again, Monsieur Trelkovsky,” the landlord said angrily. “This can’t go on any longer. All of the neighbors are complaining.”
“I beg your pardon, Monsieur Zy,” Trelkovsky said, “but are you talking about last night?”
His self-assurance took Monsieur Zy by surprise. He could not understand why his anger seemed to have no effect on his tenant, and consequently he was annoyed.
“Of course I’m talking about last night,” he said. “You made a fiendish racket again. I thought I had managed to make you realize that you wouldn’t stay in my house much longer if you went on acting that way. But I see that I’m going to be forced to take other measures . . .”
“I have been robbed, Monsieur Zy,” Trelkovsky interrupted. “I just came in a few minutes ago, and I found the door to my apartment open. I was on my way to the police station now, to register a complaint.”
The landlord’s expression changed completely. His air of stern remonstrance vanished, to be replaced by a look that was positively threatening.
“What do you mean?” he shouted. “My house is a respectable place. If you’re trying to get out of this by inventing some kind of story . . .”
“But it’s true!” Trelkovsky was shouting too. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? My apartment was broken into. I’ve been robbed!”
Monsieur Zy did not answer immediately, and then he said calmly, “I understand you perfectly. And I’m very sorry. But why are you going to the police station?”
It was Trelkovsky who was taken by surprise this time. “Why—to tell them what happened,” he stammered. “To tell them what was stolen, so they’ll know which things are mine if they catch the thieves.”
Monsieur Zy’s expression had undergone still another transformation. He was benevolent, almost paternal, now.
“Now look, Monsieur Trelkovsky,” he said, “this is an honest house. My tenants are honest people . . .”
“It’s not a question of that . . .” Trelkovsky began.
“Let me finish. You know how people are. If they see policemen here, God knows what they’ll think and say. You know how careful I am about selecting my tenants. In your own case—I let you have the apartment because I was convinced you were an honest man. If I hadn’t been, you could have offered me ten million-francs and I would have laughed in your face. If you go to the police now, they’ll send men here and ask all kinds of questions—useless questions, of course, but they can have a disastrous effect on the opinion of the other tenants. And I’m not saying that just for my own sake, but for yours too.”
“For mine! But what have I done?” Trelkovsky could not contain his astonishment.
“I know it may seem crazy to you,” the landlord said soothingly, “but people who get involved with the police are always regarded with suspicion. I know that, in this case, you are perfectly within your rights, but other people won’t know that. They’ll suspect you of God knows what, and me, too, for that matter. No; believe me, I know what I’m saying. I know the superintendent of police, and I’ll talk to him about this. He’ll know what should be done. In that way, no one can reproach you for not having done your duty as a citizen and we’ll avoid all the neighborhood gossip.”
Trelkovsky was too stunned to object.
“Oh, and by the way,” Monsieur Zy added, “the former tenant always wore slippers after ten o’clock. It was much more comfortable for her—and much more pleasant for the people below her!”
Part Two
THE
NEIGHBORS
7
The Battle
There was a battle going on, right in the heart of the building. Trelkovsky was hidden behind his curtains, watching the spectacle in the courtyard and laughing delightedly. As soon as the first sounds of argument reached his ears he had hurriedly extinguished all the lights, so that he could not be wrongly accused of anything when it was all over.
It had started in the building across the way, where the fourth floor was celebrating an anniversary of some kind. The rooms were so brightly lit that they constituted a challenge in themselves. The windows were tightly closed, because of the cold, but even so the sound of laughter and singing could be clearly heard. Trelkovsky had foreseen from the very first that the festivities would take a tragic turn. And in his own mind he had been fervently grateful to the troublemakers. “They’re just as bad as any of the others,” he thought. “I’ve already heard them complaining about the noise from the fifth floor, but that’s not important. It’ll be a case of the wolves devouring each other!”
The first reaction had been a plaintive, but nonetheless shrill voice, asking for silence for the sake of a sick woman. There was no answer to that. The second attempt, much more direct, was a shouted, “Why don’t you shut up down there? We have to work tomorrow!” Again, there was no reply. Just more laughter and singing. Trelkovsky reveled in the possibilities of this noisy pleasure. A silence that was heavy with menace had settled over every other corner of the building. One by one, the lights had gone out, demonstrating to all the world that the tenants within wanted to sleep. It was with the assurance of being well within their rights that two masculine voices then bluntly demanded silence again. A brisk dialogue ensued.
“Can’t a person even celebrate an anniversary any more?”
“All right, but enough is enough. Nobody minded your celebrating up to a decent hour, but now it’s time to call it off. Other people have to work tomorrow!”
“We have to work tomorrow too, but we have a right to a little fun now and then, don’t we?”
“Look, buddy, you’ve been told to call it off, to cut out the noise. What do we have to do to convince you?”
“If you think you’re scaring me, you’re barking up the wrong tree! I don’t like people giving me orders—we’ll do as we damned well please!”
“Oh, you will, eh? Well, why don’t you just come downstairs for a minute, and we’ll see about that?”
“Oh, shut up!”
Having arrived at this stage, the voices from either side of the courtyard began showering insults on each other, descending at last to a level of vulgarity that made Trelkovsky blush. All of the guests on the fourth floor joined in a resounding chorus of song, to prove their solidarity with their host. This development produced immediate reaction from windows which had been silent until now. An avalanche of oaths and imprecations descended on the revelers. Then the two masculine voices that had opened the battle engaged in a brief colloquy of their own, and decided to go down to the courtyard and settle this thing with the enemy once and for all.
The enemy required a little urging, but Trelkovsky was sure they wouldn’t hold out for very long. He could already hear the shouting from the court beneath his window.
“You go that way, and I’ll take this part. Call me if you catch one of them. Why don’t you come down, you bastards?”
“I saw something over there—just wait till I get my hands on you, you—!”
Trelkovsky was no longer laughing. He was beginning to be frightened. He could see that the mutual hatred of these men was no pretense. They were not playing. They seemed to have instinctively rediscovered their wartime reflexes, to have suddenly remembered things they had be
en taught in the army. They were no longer peaceful tenants, but killers in search of a victim. With his face pressed hard against the windowpane, he followed the developments of the conflict. After a complete circuit of the courtyard, the two masculine voices had now rejoined each other at its center.
“You didn’t see anything?”
“No, I caught up with someone in the hall, but he said he wasn’t one of them so I let him go.”
“They’re afraid to come down, the bastards! But they’ll have to go home sometime, and then . . . !”
There was a sudden clattering sound, as the windows on the fourth floor were thrown violently open.
“All right, you asked for it! Just stay right where you are, and we’ll see who’s giving the orders around here!”
In spite of the distance, Trelkovsky could hear the sound of footsteps pounding heavily down the stairs. In the courtyard below, the two masculine voices were jubilant.
“They took their time about it, but they’re coming! We’ll show them, the bastards—teach them to tear the place apart in the middle of the night . . . !”
The encounter must have taken place beneath the shattered glass roof, somewhere near the trash cans, because Trelkovsky heard several of them overturn noisily, punctuating the stream of cursing and shouts of rage. Then someone began to run, trying to reach the relative safety of the staircase. A silhouette detached itself from the general melee and hurled itself savagely at the fleeing man. The two figures rolled across the ground, punching and kicking at each other with spectacular agility, but never letting go. One of them finally secured his position on top, seized his opponent’s head by the ears, and began pounding it methodically against the concrete walk.
The sirens of a police car abruptly drowned out the piercing cries of the women who were now clustered at the windows, and uniformed policemen invaded the courtyard. Within a split second there was no longer anyone in sight. Then the sirens wailed off into the night, and calm returned.
That night, Trelkovsky dreamed that he got out of his bed, pulled it away from the wall, and discovered a door in the area concealed behind the headboard. Astonished by this unexpected find, he opened the door and found himself in a long corridor. An underground passage, really, sloping downward into the ground, growing steadily larger as he moved along it, and ending finally in an enormous, empty room with neither doors nor windows. Its walls were totally bare. He walked back through the underground passage, and when he came to the door behind the bed he saw that there was a shiny new lock on the side of it facing into the passage. When he slid the bolt back and forth it functioned smoothly and silently. He was suddenly possessed by a creeping sense of terror, wondering what sort of creature could have put this lock in place, where he had come from, where he had gone, and why, tonight, he had left the bolt open.
Someone was knocking on the door. Trelkovsky awoke with a start.
“Who’s there?” he called.
“It’s me,” a woman’s voice answered.
He put on an old bathrobe and went to open.
A woman he had never seen before was standing on the threshold, clutching the hand of a girl of about twenty. From the expression in the girl’s eyes, Trelkovsky recognized at once that she was a mute.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
The woman must have been about sixty, perhaps a trifle older. Her eyes were very black, and she was staring directly into Trelkovsky’s face. She made a little gesture with the sheet of paper she held in her free hand.
“Was it you, monsieur, who registered a complaint about me?”
“A complaint?”
“Yes—for causing a disturbance at night.”
Trelkovsky was dumfounded. “I’ve never made any kind of complaint!” he said angrily.
The woman promptly burst into tears. She seemed to collapse against the slight figure of the girl, who was observing Trelkovsky intently.
“Someone made a complaint about me,” the woman said. “I got this paper this morning. But it isn’t me—she’s the one who makes all the noise. All night long.”
“Who do you mean—she?” Trelkovsky asked, more bewildered than ever.
“That old woman. She’s a nasty old woman, monsieur. She does everything she can to make things hard for me. Just because I have a crippled daughter . . .” She lifted the long skirt that shrouded the girl’s legs, and pointed to the heavy, orthopedic shoe on her left foot. “She hates me, because I have a crippled daughter. And now I get a letter saying that I make disturbances at night! It’s not you, monsieur? You’re not the one who made the complaint?”
“Of course not,” Trelkovsky said. “I told you, I’ve never made a complaint.”
“Then it must be her. I asked downstairs, but they hadn’t done it either. They said it might have been you. But it must be that old woman.” Her face was bathed in tears, her voice cracked and faltering. “I don’t make any noise, monsieur. I go to bed very early, every night. I’m not like her. If I were, I would have made a complaint about her, long before this. She’s an old woman, monsieur, and like all old women she can’t get to sleep at night, so she walks up and down in her apartment, she moves furniture, and she keeps me from sleeping—and my daughter, too. I had the most awful time finding this hovel we live in, monsieur; I sold all of my jewelry, I sweated blood, and if that old woman has me thrown out I don’t know where we’ll go. Do you know what she did, monsieur?”
Trelkovsky shook his head, but the woman had obviously not expected an answer, because she went ahead with her story almost without a pause.
“She put a broom across my door, to keep me from going out. She wedged it against the doorknob—you could see it was done deliberately—and when I tried to go out that morning I couldn’t open the door. I pulled and pulled and I must have twisted something in my shoulder; it was black and blue for days. And do you know what she told me? She said she had just left it there by accident! And now she’s made a complaint about me; I have to go to the police station. If she has me thrown out . . .”
“But she can’t have you thrown out,” Trelkovsky said, feeling an enormous sympathy for the unhappy woman. “She can’t do anything like that.”
“Do you really think so? I never make any noise, monsieur, honestly . . .”
“Even if you did, she couldn’t do anything! They don’t have the right to throw you out if you have no place else to go. She couldn’t do it . . .”
The woman seemed slightly reassured. She thanked Trelkovsky, between little fits of sobbing, and started down the staircase, still leaning on her daughter.
Where did she live? Trelkovsky leaned across the railing, trying to see where she went, but she did not stop on the floor below. She disappeared from sight before he could learn anything.
He went back into his own apartment, and as he shaved and dressed to go to the office he kept turning over in his mind this business of the complaint. When he considered it objectively, it looked very suspicious. In the first place, he didn’t even know where this woman lived; and in the second, he thought it odd that the tenants beneath him—the landlord and his wife—would have given his name as the probable plaintiff. Wasn’t it much more likely that they had wanted to show him what could happen to him if he continued to disturb the neighbors? Without meaning to imply anything wrong about her, wasn’t it possible that this woman had been paid to come to his door and play this part? Who was the old woman she kept talking about? He had never seen anyone in the building who remotely resembled her description. Something about the whole story rang very false.
He went down the stairs as silently as possible. He had no desire to meet Monsieur Zy this morning. He was forced, as always, to make a mock genuflection in front of the row of mailboxes in the courtyard, to see if there was anything in his. There were two letters.
One was addressed to Mademoiselle Choule, and the other to himself. It was not the first time he had received mail intended for the former tenant. At first, he had hesitated
about opening it, but his curiosity had gradually overcome this initial repugnance; he had told himself that he really should see if it was anything important, and from then on he had opened everything. His own letter was of no importance—a mimeographed advertisement. He crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the trash can as he passed. He went to the café across the street for his morning coffee. The waiter greeted him cheerfully.
“Coffee? No nerves today? What about chocolate?”
“Yes,” Trelkovsky said. “Chocolate. And dry toast—two.” He called the waiter back before he had had time to fill the order. “And bring me a pack of Gauloises.”
The waiter spread his hands in a gesture of utter despair. “I’m out of them right now. I’ll have to go get some for you down the street.”
Trelkovsky shrugged. “What do you have?”
“Gitanes—the straight Virginias. Mademoiselle Choule always used to smoke those. Shall I bring you a pack?”
“All right, Gitanes. But without a filter.”
“Right. She didn’t like the filtered ones either.”
Trelkovsky had ripped open the flap of the letter addressed to Simone Choule. He read:
“Mademoiselle—I hope you will forgive the liberty I am taking in writing to you. A mutual friend, Pierre Aram, gave me your address, and told me that you might be able to give me some information which is extremely important to me. I live in Lyon, and work there as a sales clerk in a bookshop. But personal reasons make it necessary for me to leave here and come to live in Paris. I have been offered a job in a bookshop located at 80 rue de la Victoire. I must give the owners my reply within a week, but I am very uncertain about it at the moment, because I have just received an offer of another job in a shop located at 12 rue de Vaugirard. I don’t know Paris very well, and I know nothing of these two shops. Since I will be getting a commission on sales, I should naturally like to learn a little more about the possibilities in each of them.