The Tenant

by Roland Topor

  After this, he stood up again and wandered from one room to the other until it occurred to him to pause in front of the little mirror he had hung on the wall just above the washbasin. He studied his reflection for some time, quite dispassionately, turning his head first to the left, then to the right, and finally lifting it so that he could observe the gaping cavity of his nostrils. Then, very slowly, he passed the palm of his hand over his entire face. His fingertips revealed the presence of a stiff little hair at the very tip of his nose. He brought his face up close against the mirror, searching for it. A little brown hair thrusting outward from a large pore. He went over to the bed, took a box of matches from the pocket of his coat, and very carefully selected two which seemed to have the sharpest, cleanest bases. Then he returned to the mirror and began trying to remove the hair, using the two matches as a makeshift tweezer. But the matches slipped, or else he hadn’t gotten a good grip on the hair, because at the last moment it always got away. He was very patient, however, and in the end he succeeded. The hair was longer than he had thought it would be.

  This much accomplished, he began squeezing idly at some blackheads on his forehead, but they didn’t really interest him. He stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes, but he did not go to sleep.

  He decided to tell himself a story.

  “I’m on horseback, leading ten thousand maddened Zaporozhe Cossacks. For three days now, the frenzied hoofs of our horses have thundered across the steppes. Ten thousand enemy horsemen are racing toward us, surging across the horizon with the speed of lightning. We don’t turn an inch from our course; the shock of the two hordes, when they come together, can be heard for miles. I am the only one who remains in his saddle. I draw my scimitar and begin carving a path through the masses of men on the ground. I don’t even look to see who receives the blows. I just cut and chop away. In a little while, the plain is nothing but a vast expanse of bloody remains. I sink my spurs into my horse’s flanks, and he whinnies violently with the pain of it. The wind presses against my head like a tight-fitting helmet. Behind me, I hear the cries of my ten thousand Cossacks . . . No, behind me, I hear . . . No. I’m walking in the streets of a city, at night. The sound of footsteps makes me turn around. I see a woman, trying to escape from a drunken sailor. He snatches at her dress, and it tears away. The woman is half naked. I hurl myself at the brute and knock him to the ground with just the impetus of my charge. He does not get up. The woman comes up to me . . . No, the woman runs off into the darkness . . . No. The Métro at six o’clock in the evening. It’s filled to overflowing. At every station, more people try to get into the cars. They push and shove the people who are already inside, supporting themselves against the doors and butting backward with their rump. I arrive, and give the biggest shove of all. The whole crowd of people in the car bursts through its walls and falls onto the tracks. The train coming in the other direction crushes the screaming mass of travelers. It goes on through the station in the middle of a river of blood . . .”

  Had someone knocked at the door? Yes, someone was knocking.

  It must be the mysterious Madame Dioz.

  The old woman who stood on the landing outside his door was a startling sight. Her eyes were bloodshot and heavily ringed, her mouth a straight, lipless line, and her nose very nearly touched the point of her chin.

  “I have to talk to you,” she announced, in a voice that was astonishingly clear and precise.

  “Come in, madame,” Trelkovsky said politely.

  She marched unhesitatingly to the door of the second room, and glanced furtively around it, as if making sure that they were alone. Without looking at Trelkovsky, she handed him a sheet of ruled paper. He took it from her, and noted that it already bore several signatures. On its reverse side there was a short text, carefully written out in violet ink. It was a statement that the signators were lodging a formal protest against a certain Madame Gaderian, who caused disturbances after ten o’clock at night. The old woman had lost interest in the apartment and was watching Trelkovsky, attempting to gauge his reactions.

  “Well,” she said. “Will you sign?”

  Trelkovsky could feel the blood draining slowly from his face. How dare they suggest such a thing to him? Just to be sure he knew what they were preparing for him? They wanted to force his hand, and they were using blackmail to do it. This woman, whoever she was, first, and then he would be next, and if he refused to sign now he would be the first to suffer the consequences of his refusal. He looked for the signature of Monsieur Zy on the list. It was there, prominently displayed.

  “Who is this Madame Gaderian?” he managed to say at last. “I don’t know her.”

  The old woman’s words came out in an angry whistle. “She’s the only thing you hear, after ten o’clock! She walks up and down, she moves things around, she does her dishes in the middle of the night! She wakes up everyone. She makes life impossible for all the other tenants.”

  “Is she the one who lives with a crippled daughter?” Trelkovsky asked.

  “Nothing of the sort; she has a fourteen-year-old son, A good-for-nothing who amuses himself by hopping around the floor on one leg, all day long!”

  “Are you sure? I mean—are you absolutely certain she doesn’t have a young daughter?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Ask the concierge. Anyone in the building can tell you.”

  Trelkovsky pulled himself up very straight. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m not signing any petition. This woman has never disturbed me; I’ve never even heard her. What apartment does she live in?”

  The old woman evaded the question. “As you like,” she said angrily. “I’m not forcing you to do anything. But if she wakes you up some night, don’t come looking for me. It will be your own fault.”

  “Try to understand my point of view, madame,” Trelkovsky pleaded. “I know you must have your reasons for doing this, and I don’t want to cause you any difficulties, but I just can’t sign it. Perhaps there is some reason why she has to do all of these things at night.”

  “Reasons—ha!” The old woman laughed disgustedly. “She has her reasons, all right—that’s the way she is. She’s a pest. There are always people who want nothing more than to torment everyone else. And if the others don’t stand up and defend themselves, they end by walking all over them. Well, I have no intention of letting anyone walk all over me; I won’t permit it. I’ll go straight to someone who can do something about it. If you don’t want to help us, that’s up to you, but don’t come complaining to me later. Give that back to me.”

  She snatched her precious sheet of paper from Trelkovsky’s hand, and without so much as a word of farewell marched to the door, slamming it violently behind her.

  “The bastards!” Trelkovsky raged. “The bastards! What the hell do they want—for everyone else to roll over and play dead! And even that probably wouldn’t be enough! The bastards!”

  He was so angry he was trembling. He went down to dinner in the restaurant where he always ate, trying to put it out of his mind, but when he returned to the apartment his fury was still pulsing through him. He went to sleep gnashing his teeth in helpless rage.

  The next night, it was the woman with the crippled daughter who came to knock at his door, just before ten o’clock. She wasn’t weeping this time. Her eyes were hard and cold, veiling a wicked glitter, but she seemed to relax a little when she saw Trelkovsky.

  “Ah, monsieur!” she cried, “you see! I told you so. She’s gotten up a petition against me! She has won! I’m going to be forced to leave. What a wicked, nasty woman! And they all signed—all of them, except you. I came to thank you. You’re a good man, monsieur.”

  The girl was staring intently at Trelkovsky, just as she had the other night, and so was the woman now, her eyes glittering more fiercely than ever.

  “I don’t like this kind of thing,” he stammered, confused and upset by the way they were watching him. “I don’t want to get mixed up in it.”

  “No, no; it�
�s not just that.” The woman shook her head, as if she were suddenly very tired. “You’re a good man. I can see it in your eyes.”

  She straightened abruptly and laughed. “But I got even! The concierge is just as bad as she is, but I got even with her, too!”

  She looked around her, assuring herself that no one else could hear, and then went on, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Between the complaint and the petition, they’ve made me so nervous I got the colic. So you know what I did?”

  The girl was still staring at Trelkovsky. He gestured feebly, indicating that he didn’t know.

  “I did it on the staircase!”

  She laughed obscenely, but her eyes were hard with malice. “I did—on every floor, the whole length of the staircase. It’s their fault; they’re the ones who gave me the colic. But I didn’t do anything in front of your apartment. I wouldn’t have wanted to make trouble for you.”

  Trelkovsky was horrified. First by her story, and then by the lightning realization that, far from avoiding trouble for him, the absence of stains in front of his door could only more positively condemn him.

  “How—how long ago?” he gasped.

  She chuckled happily. “Just now. Just a minute or two ago. I’d like to see their faces when they find it tomorrow! And the concierge! She’ll have to clean it all up! It’s just what they deserve, all of them.”

  She clasped her hands together. He could hear her, still chuckling gleefully as she went down the steps. He leaned over the railing to see if she had been telling the truth. She had. A yellowish trail zigzagged down the line of the steps. He put his hands to his forehead.

  “They’re going to think I did it! I’ve got to do something—I have to!”

  But he couldn’t possibly start cleaning it all up now. He might be surprised by one of the other neighbors at any moment. He thought of doing it himself in front of his door, but he realized immediately that he couldn’t, and in any case the difference in color and consistency would give him away. There might just be another solution.

  Struggling to control his feeling of nausea, he found a piece of cardboard in the apartment and used this to gather up a little of the excrement from the steps leading up to the fourth floor. His heart was pounding violently against his ribs, he was bathed in fear and disgust, but he forced himself on. When he had finished, he dumped the contents of the piece of cardboard on the landing outside his door. Then he raced across to the toilet, to rid himself of the cardboard.

  When he got back to his own apartment he was more dead than alive. He set the alarm clock to go off earlier than usual. He had no desire to witness the scene which would follow the discovery of what had happened.

  But the next morning there was no trace of the events of the night before. A strong antiseptic odor rose from the still-damp wood of the steps.

  Trelkovsky had his chocolate and two slices of dry toast in the café across the street.

  Since he was early, he decided to walk to the office. He strolled through the streets unhurriedly, observing the passing crowds. The ranks of faces filed steadily, almost rhythmically, before him, as if their owners were standing on some kind of endless, moving sidewalk. Faces with the great bulging eyes of toads; pinched and wary faces of disillusioned men; round, soft faces of abnormal children; bull necks, fishlike noses, ferret teeth. Half closing his eyes, he imagined that they were really all one face, shifting and changing like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. He was astonished by the peculiarity of all these faces. Martians—they were all Martians. But they were ashamed of it, and so they tried to conceal it. They had determined, once and for all, that their monstrous disproportions were, in reality, true proportion, and their inconceivable ugliness was beauty. They were strangers on this planet, but they refused to admit it. They played at being perfectly at home. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was no different. Identical, exactly the same likeness as that of the monsters. He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished from their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws. Ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety.

  Three young men attempted to speak to a woman just in front of him. She said something very brief and sharp, and strode rapidly away. The men began to laugh and slap each other heartily on the back.

  Virility was something else that disgusted him. He had never understood this business of vulgar pride in one’s body and one’s sex. They grunted and wallowed like hogs in their men’s trousers, but they were still hogs. Why did they disguise themselves, why did they feel compelled to cover their bodies with clothing when everything they did reeked of the belly and the glands it harbored? He smiled to himself.

  “I wonder what someone who could read my mind would think, if he were walking beside me now.”

  This was a question he often asked himself. Occasionally, he would even play at making up problems for the unknown mind reader to solve. He would say all kinds of things to him; sometimes telling him the truth about himself, and at other times just being crude and insulting. Then, as if he were talking on the telephone, he would pause suddenly in his narrative and listen for a reply. Quite obviously he never got one.

  “He would probably think that I’m homosexual.”

  But he wasn’t homosexual, he didn’t have a sufficiently religious mind for that. Every homosexual is a sort of would-be Christ. And Christ, Trelkovsky thought, was a homosexual whose eyes were larger than his belly’s appetite. People like that simply wanted to bleed for humanity; it was nauseating.

  “I suppose I think that way because I am a man, after all. God knows what I might think if I had been born a woman . . .”

  He burst out laughing. But then the picture of Simone Choule on her hospital bed flashed before his eyes, and the laughter froze on his lips.

  10

  The Fever

  He was ill. For several days, he had not felt well. Cold chills raced across his back and up the length of his spine, his jaw trembled uncontrollably, his forehead burned one moment and was covered with an icy sweat the next. At first, he had refused to believe that anything was wrong, he had gone on as if nothing had happened. In the office, he was forced to hold his head in his hands, trying to shut out the constant buzzing in his ears. If he had to climb a flight of steps, no matter how short, he was in pitiful condition when he reached the top. He could not go on like this any longer; he was ill, he was desperately ill.

  Some kind of impurity had managed to work its way into the mechanism of his body, threatening to destroy it completely. But what was it? A mote that formed an obstacle to the proper functioning of two linked wheels? A gear that had somehow become unmeshed? A microbe?

  The neighborhood doctor gave him no information as to the causes of the breakdown. He confined himself to prescribing a weak dosage of antibiotics, as a precautionary measure, and some little yellow pills that he was to take twice a day. He also recommended that he eat a great deal of yoghurt. That had sounded like a joke, but the doctor shook his head vigorously.

  “No, no,” he said, “I assure you, I mean it. A lot of yoghurt. It will restore the condition of your intestines. Come to see me again in a week.”

  Trelkovsky stopped by the pharmacy on his way back to the apartment. He came out with his pockets full of little cardboard boxes which, in some manner, already gave him a feeling of reassurance.

  As soon as he was safely at home he opened the boxes, took out the sheets of instructions and recommendations, and read them carefully. The medicines prescribed for him certainly seemed to possess some extraordinary qualities. But the next night he was no better. His cautious optimism was replaced with dull despair. He realized now that the medicines were in no way miraculous, and the notices in the boxes were nothing but advertisements. He had known it from the beginning, actually, but he had felt compelled to go on playing the game until he cou
ld prove that it was crooked.

  He was in bed. He was very warm, but he felt that he was not warm enough. The upper sheet was pulled up around his nose, and he could feel a damp area where the saliva from his mouth had wet it. He didn’t have strength enough to blink his eyes. Either he lay there, holding them wide open, staring at nothing, or he drew a fleshy iron curtain across them, when the longing for oblivion became too strong. And even then, if he turned his head toward the window, the comfortable obscurity was tinged with a purple light.

  He curled up in a ball beneath the covers. He was more acutely conscious of himself than he had ever been before. All of his dimensions were thoroughly familiar to him. He had spent so many hours observing and redesigning his own body that now he felt like someone who had just come across an unfortunate friend. He tried to constrict himself into the smallest possible space, so that the invading forces of weakness could find no room for a beachhead. His knees were drawn up almost into his stomach, the calves of his legs were tight against his thighs, and his elbows pressed hard against his ribs.

  Above everything, it seemed imperative that he find a manner of placing his head on the pillow so that he could not hear the beating of his heart. He turned and twisted over and over again before finally discovering one position that left him blessedly deaf. He could not bear to listen to that horrible sound, constantly reminding him of the fragility of his existence. It had often occurred to him that perhaps every man was accorded at birth a specific number of heartbeats, thus predetermining the duration of his life. When he realized now that, in spite of all his efforts, he could still hear the hesitant beating of his heart against his chest he took refuge beneath the covers. He pulled his head in under the sheet, and stared wildly at the outlines of his body cowering in the gloom. Seen in this light, it took on a powerful, even massive, appearance. The sharp and penetrating animal odor it exuded fascinated him. He felt strangely calmer. He forced himself to break wind, so that the odor of his body would become even stronger, more unbearable. He remained beneath the covers as long as he possibly could, until he was on the verge of stifling, but when he finally emerged into the fresh air again he was strengthened. He felt more certain of the eventual outcome of his illness, a new peace of mind succeeded his earlier anguish.