The Tenant

by Roland Topor

  That night, his condition grew worse. When he woke up, the sheets were soaked with sweat. His teeth were chattering. He was so thoroughly anesthetized by the fever that he was not even afraid. He wrapped himself in a blanket and went to boil some water on a little electric plate that had belonged to the former tenant. When the water boiled he made himself a semblance of a hot drink, by pouring it through a strainer filled with tea leaves he had used before. He swallowed this, and took two aspirin tablets, and felt a little better.

  He went back to bed, but as soon as he had turned out the light and was lying there in the darkness he was overcome by a feeling that the room around him was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller, until at last the walls formed a tight-fitting capsule around his body. He was suffocating. He reached out frantically for the light switch, and immediately the room returned to its normal dimensions. He inhaled deeply, trying to catch his breath.

  “It’s idiotic,” he murmured.

  He turned out the light again. The room sprang back at him like a taut elastic band when it is suddenly released. It surrounded him like a sarcophagus, weighing down his chest, circling his head, crushing in against the back of his neck.

  In an instant he was suffocating, but fortunately his fingers located the switch at the last possible moment. His liberation was as sudden as it had been the first time.

  He decided to sleep with the light on.

  But it wasn’t as easy as he had thought. The room did not change in its dimensions now—no, it was its consistency that was transformed.

  More precisely, the consistency of the empty space between the furnishings.

  It was as if this space had been flooded with water which then turned into ice. The space between the objects in the room had abruptly become as hard and solid as an iceberg. And he, Trelkovsky, was one of those objects. He was imprisoned again. Not in a stone within the apartment this time, but in a void of space. He tried to move his limbs to shatter the illusion, but without success.

  He remained a prisoner for more than an hour. It was impossible to sleep.

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the phenomenon passed. The spell was broken. To make sure of it, he closed one eye. Yes, he could move again.

  But the movement had unleashed a new sequence of events.

  He had closed his left eye—very well—but in spite of the fact that his field of vision had been cut in half he had still seen everything! The objects in the room had simply moved over to the right. He closed his right eye, still not believing what had happened. The objects immediately moved over to the left. It wasn’t possible! He selected two spots on the wallpaper as points of reference and blinked his eyes rapidly. But if he did not move his head he forgot the reference point he had chosen, and if he remembered the first one he couldn’t find the second. He kept at it stubbornly, but in vain. And as a result of the effort of closing first his left eye and then his right he had an atrocious headache. His skull felt as though it had been put through a mangle. He closed his eyes, but the picture of the room was still there. He could see as well as if his eyelids were made of glass.

  The night, and its nightmare visions, drew to an end at last. Sleep came to his rescue, and did not leave him until late in the afternoon.

  He heard the workmen in the courtyard, repairing the glass roof. He wanted to get up, but he was too weak. He thought he might be hungry.

  Solitude revealed itself to him in all its horror.

  No one to look after him, to pamper him, to pass a cool hand across his forehead and check on the course of his fever. He was alone, absolutely alone, just as though he were about to die. And if that should happen, how many days would it be before they found his body? A week? A month, perhaps? Who would be the first to enter his sepulcher?

  The neighbors, no doubt, or the landlord. No one cared about him now, but it would be another matter when the rent came due. Even in death he would not be allowed to dispose freely of an apartment that did not belong to him. He tried to stem this depressing train of thought.

  “I’m exaggerating; I’m not really so alone as all that. I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I know that if I just think about it . . . Let’s see . . .”

  He sought and sought, but no, he was alone, more alone than he had ever been. It was then that he realized the change that had taken place in his life. Why? What had happened?

  The feeling of having an answer on the tip of his tongue upset him strangely. Why? There must be an answer. He had always been surrounded with friends, with relatives, with acquaintances of all sorts; he had guarded them jealously, precisely because he had known that there might be days when he would have need of them; and now he found himself alone, on a deserted island in the middle of a desert!

  What a blind fool he had been! His mind refused even to recognize himself.

  The hammering of the workmen in the courtyard drew him back from this gulf of self-pity. Since no one thought or cared about Trelkovsky, Trelkovsky must take care of himself.

  And first, he must eat.

  He dressed himself, not knowing quite what it was he was wearing. The descent of the staircase was terribly difficult. He wasn’t conscious of the problem at first, but then the wooden steps transformed themselves into shelves of stone, rough-surfaced and unevenly joined. He stumbled against unexpected obstacles, bruised his body against sharp projections. And then countless little stairways began branching out from the main staircase beneath his feet. Tortuous little stairways, jungle stairways with bushy steps, stairways that turned inside out, so that it was impossible to tell whether you were on the exterior going down or the interior going up. In this labyrinth, he could find no way to guide himself, and he often lost his way. After having gone down one staircase that had suddenly reversed itself, he arrived at a ceiling. There was neither a door nor any sort of opening that would permit him to continue. Nothing but a smooth white ceiling, forcing him to lower his head. He resigned himself to turning around and starting over. But the staircase behaved as though it were balanced on an axis, like a seesaw, and when he arrived at a certain point that side went down and the other went up. It forced him to climb when he wanted to go down, and to go down when he knew he must climb.

  Trelkovsky was terribly tired. For how many centuries had he been wandering these infernal corridors? He didn’t know. He did know, vaguely, that it was his duty to go on.

  Quite frequently, heads were thrust through the walls, observing him curiously. There was no expression on the faces, but he could hear laughter and the sound of sneers. The heads never stayed in place very long. They disappeared almost at once, but a little farther on other heads of the same kind would come out to look at Trelkovsky. He wanted to run along the walls with a gigantic razor blade in his hand, cutting off everything that projected beyond the stone. But unfortunately he had no such blade.

  He was unaware of the fact that he had arrived at the ground floor. He went on with his interminable turning, going down, then climbing up. But at last he noticed the gaping hole in the unfinished roof of glass. The light made him shudder.

  He could no longer remember why he had come out. His hunger was gone. He wanted only to be back in his bed. His illness must be more serious than he had thought. He managed to get back to the apartment without any great difficulty, but he had no strength left to take off his clothes. He pulled the sheets around him without taking off his shoes. But even like this his teeth were chattering.

  When he awoke, it was night. He was no better, but the utter mindlessness of the fever had left him, giving way to an extraordinary sensation of lucidity. He got up quite easily. Still mistrusting his own reactions, he tried to walk a few steps, and found that he had no dizziness. It was more as though his feet were not touching the ground. This improvement at least permitted him to take off his clothes. He went over to the window to hang his trousers over the back of a chair, and automatically he glanced out at the oval window across the way. And in that room he saw a woman he recognized at once. S
imone Choule.

  She was sitting, in the position he had seen so often before, but then, as if she had guessed that he was watching her, she turned slowly in his direction. One hand went up to her face and she began undoing the bandage that covered it. She allowed only the lower half to be revealed, just up to the base of the nose. A hideous smile stretched the corners of her mouth.

  Trelkovsky pressed his hands against his forehead. He wanted to tear himself away from this spectacle, but he did not have the strength.

  Simone Choule was moving again. None of her gestures escaped Trelkovsky. He saw her lift her arm to pull the chain, make a final adjustment to her clothing, and then go out. The light in the toilet went dark.

  Only then did he manage to turn away from the window. He went on taking off his clothes, but his fingers trembled when he tried to unbutton his shirt. He had to pull it open to get it off, and the cloth made a mournful sound as it tore. He didn’t notice it. He was thinking of nothing but what he had just seen.

  It wasn’t so much the sight of Simone Choule’s ghost that bothered him, since he was reasonably sure that his fever was responsible for that hallucination; but there had been another, even more bizarre sensation, while he was watching her.

  For the space of several seconds he had thought himself transported across the courtyard and into the toilet, and from there he had been looking into the window of his own apartment. He had seen a face pressed against the glass, the face of a man who resembled him like a twin, and the eyes in that face had stared at him as if they were seeing a vision of unutterable horror.

  11

  The Revelation

  The fever had passed, but Trelkovsky was finding it difficult to return to his normal way of life. As it receded, the fever must have carried with it some particle of himself, because now he had the feeling of being somehow incomplete. His blunted senses constantly gave him the impression of being out of step with his body. He was disturbed by it.

  When he got out of bed that morning he seemed to be obeying a will that was not his own. He thrust his feet into the slippers he always wore in the apartment, slipped a bathrobe around his shoulders, and went to boil some water for his tea. He was still too weak to go back to the office.

  When the water boiled, he poured it over the strainer that held the tea leaves—fresh ones, this time. The liquid in the cup was a beautiful color, as delicate as some Chinese inks, and with: an aroma that was soft, discreet, and yet irresistible. Trelkovsky never put sugar in his tea. Instead, he put a lump of sugar in his mouth and then drank the tea in little sips.

  He could hear the hammering of the workmen repairing the glass roof over the courtyard. Automatically, Trelkovsky put a lump of sugar on his tongue, took the cup in his hand, and walked over to the window. The two workmen happened to be looking up at the time. When they saw Trelkovsky they burst into vulgar laughter. He thought at first that he was mistaken about it, that he was simply the victim of an optical illusion. But the truth of the matter was almost immediately apparent: the workmen were quite openly making fun of him. He was baffled, and then he became annoyed. He drew his eyebrows together in a frown, hoping to show them what he thought of their behavior, but this produced no results whatever.

  “It’s too much,” he thought. “What the devil do they think they’re doing?”

  He opened the window angrily and leaned out over the guard rail. The workmen began laughing even louder.

  By this time Trelkovsky was trembling with rage. To such an extent, in fact, that the cup fell out of his hand. When he bent over to pick up the pieces, he heard another burst of noisy laughter. The workmen were apparently vastly amused by his clumsiness. When he looked out of the window again they were still watching him, smiling in a manner that was oddly nasty.

  “What have I done to them?” he wondered.

  Obviously, he had done nothing. But for some reason they were his enemies, and since he could not imagine why, he felt he could not tolerate it any longer.

  “What’s the matter?” he cried, pretending he had not understood what the men were doing. “What do you want?”

  The loud, vulgar character of their laughter became even more pronounced. They watched for a few moments longer and then went back to their work. But even with their backs to him, Trelkovsky was conscious of the smile that twisted their lips, and from time to time they glanced up at his window, shook their heads, and muttered something to each other.

  He felt as if he were rooted to the floor, petrified by his astonishment and anger, seeking vainly for a reason for what had happened.

  “What on earth can it be? Why should they have started laughing the minute they saw me?”

  He went over to the mirror and stared at his reflection.

  But he was no longer himself.

  He leaned closer to the mirror, and a muted scream of terror welled up in his throat. Then he fainted.

  When he recovered consciousness some time later he realized at once that he had hurt himself in falling. He pulled himself painfully to his feet, and the first thing he saw was his image in the mirror—the face of a woman, heavily made-up. He could see it all now; the lipstick on his mouth, the rouge on his cheeks, the mascara on his eyelashes.

  His fear became so tangible a thing that he could feel it forming a solid ball in his throat. Its surface was as sharp and rough as the teeth of a saw, tearing at his larynx. Why was he disguised like this?

  He didn’t walk in his sleep, he was certain of that. And where had the cosmetics come from? He began a frantic search of the apartment, and found them very quickly, in a drawer of the little chest. There were at least a dozen bottles of every size and color, as well as tubes and jars of creams.

  Was he going mad?

  He snatched the bottles out of the drawer and hurled them against the wall, where they shattered noisily.

  The neighbors promptly rapped on the wall.

  So he was going mad, was he? He burst out laughing.

  The neighbors rapped again, harder this time.

  He stopped laughing. He was beginning to understand. And it was not funny.

  His pajama jacket was soaked with sweat; it felt glued to his skin. He collapsed on the bed, fighting with all his strength against the explanation that had come to mind. But he knew that it was useless; the truth was there in front of him, bursting across his vision like fireworks in a night sky.

  It was their doing.

  The neighbors were slowly transforming him into Simone Choule!

  Using a thousand shabby little tricks, an unceasing vigilance, an iron determination, they were altering his whole personality. They were all in it together, they were all equally guilty. And he had fallen into their incredible trap like the innocent fool he was. They had disguised themselves and lied about each other, just to trick him. They had acted in this weird manner for no reason except to demoralize him and make him lose faith in his own intelligence. He had been nothing but a toy in their hands. When he thought back to all the details of his life in this apartment he realized that it had been that way from the very first. The concierge had called his attention to the window of the toilet the minute he stepped foot in this room. She had known all about the things that would happen there. And there was no point in wondering any longer who had cleared away the trash he dropped on the staircase. It was the neighbors.

  It was also the neighbors who had robbed him, burning his bridges behind him, removing all possibility of a return to normalcy by depriving him of his past. And whenever his earlier personality showed signs of returning, it was the neighbors who rapped on the walls. They had made him abandon his friends, and forced him into wearing bedroom slippers and a bathrobe. It was a neighbor working in the café across the street who had made him drink chocolate instead of coffee, and smoke Gitanes instead of Gauloises. They had cunningly dictated all of his actions, all of his decisions. Nothing of himself had been left to him.

  And now, taking advantage of the fever and his exhausted sleep,
they had decided to strike a major blow. They had painted him to resemble a woman. But they had made a mistake this time; he wasn’t quite ready for this. It had come too soon.

  He remembered the thoughts he had had on the subject of virility. So that was it! Even his most private reflections had been imposed on him by others.

  He took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of the bathrobe and lit one. He was going to have to think about all this, as calmly as possible. And above everything, he must not lose his head. He inhaled deeply from the cigarette, watching the wisps of smoke drift upward from his nostrils. What about the landlord?

  He was certainly the leader. He was the one who controlled all the movements of his pack of assassins. And the old woman, Madame Dioz? And the woman with the crippled daughter? Victims, like himself? Or neighbors? Neighbors, undoubtedly, charged with some inexplicable secret mission. And what about Stella?

  Had she been warned that he would be coming to the hospital? Had she been sent there only to intercept him, to subject him to an influence he would have no reason to mistrust, because she had no connection with the apartment or the neighbors? He decided that, for the time being at least, he must believe in her innocence. He couldn’t afford to see enemies everywhere he looked. He was not mad!

  But what crime had he committed, that they should be so intent on his destruction? Perhaps the same crime as that of a fly caught in the trap of a spider’s web. The building was a trap, and the trap functioned. It was even possible that they had no personal animosity toward him. But when he thought of the stern, unbending faces of the neighbors, he abandoned this hypothesis. There could be no doubt of their personal animosity to Trelkovsky. They could not forgive him, just because he was Trelkovsky; they hated him for that, and they had determined to punish him for it.