An Untouched House

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  I went out the back door, across the marble terrace and down into the garden, as I had done so many times before. I looked up at the two windows I had calculated as belonging to the locked room. There was nothing to see. As always, they were covered with blackout paper. Nothing had changed. Walking back and forth, I studied all of the protrusions on the back wall: window frames, downpipes. I couldn’t see any way of climbing up without a ladder. It wasn’t even possible to reach them from the window of another room.

  Back in the house, entering my bedroom, I had to slide the cat out of the way with the door. He had been lying on the floor behind it and I just managed to grab him by the scruff of the neck as he tried to slip past me to get to the locked room. Together we lay down on the bed while I held him tightly in my arms.

  “Nothing’s allowed to change,” I whispered in his ear, “we’re staying here. Everything’s staying like it is. One day the war will be over. The Germans will withdraw. And we’ll stay here forever.” He shook his head, making a flapping sound with his ears.

  “Nobody’s allowed in this town except the Germans and me,” I said. “The Germans will never find out I’m not the owner. And the war will never end. This town will stay off limits forever, except to me. I lifted the cat up with my hands under his front legs, feeling his tiny heart beating against my right thumb, as fast as a watch. He didn’t look at me, his neck was stretched out and he was holding his head away. His eyes, so constrained in their velvet cases, stared ahead as if passively considering the consequences of an unavoidable yet cruel decision.

  I let go of him. He jumped down onto the floor with a thud and went back to his post behind the door.

  After living there a little longer, I hardly left the house. I didn’t go any further than the summer house in the garden. I felt no need for any activity at all. I spent most of my time in bed in the bedroom; I didn’t wake before noon and had sometimes gone back to sleep again before dark. I only did things that didn’t require any thought. Every day I stayed in the bath until the salts in the water had settled. The layer of sediment was slowly building up, but the tub was still spacious enough. Then I would walk up and down, touching objects without investigating them. On medicine bottles and compacts, on handkerchiefs, and on the edges of sheets were names I didn’t try to pronounce. I completely emptied the wardrobes, tossing silks, velvets and furs onto a pile my cat began to use as a bed. I crawled through them, breathing in the smells. I carefully studied twenty-five pairs of shoes, one after the other, because shoes are the only thing that retain something of the wearer when she is absent. A shoe always has the same shape even if there’s no foot in it. Shoes don’t collapse into flat rags the moment they’re taken off. I felt the soles and the smooth high heels with the palm of my hand. I placed them two by two around the room until there were twenty-five women standing around me. If they were naked and invisible there was nothing to prove they weren’t there, maybe even wiggling their hips, waving their hands above their heads; they could be doing anything as long as they were keeping their feet still.

  One day when I had slept in even later than usual, I was so awake I went to the library to get something to read. But all the books were written in a language I didn’t know, except for a number of academic works in German. They were large old-fashioned volumes, with slightly tacky colored plates; loose sheets of waxed paper had been laid over them to prevent damage. They were concerned exclusively with fish. Once this had sunk in, I flung them back into the bookcase and left the library never to return. All the books were about fish. That meant the owner was a fish fancier! Finally I had discovered something about the person who had furnished the house. A fish fancier! I knew something, but I didn’t want to know anything, not his name, not what he looked like, nothing! He had never existed, that was the truth! He had been the intruder, not me. He would be dead at the end of the war; I would stay here forever.

  But every now and then my cat would yowl in the night for hours on end. I let him wander wherever he liked, but he just meowed at the door of the room that hadn’t been open yet. He tensed his back and dug his claws into the nailed rug, trying to tear up the floor to gain entry. He gave me no rest. I was scared the Germans would hear and come upstairs to ask what was going on and why that cat just stayed sitting there.

  That was why, one sunny morning when I couldn’t hear any sounds and there were no cars parked out in front, so I could be sure not a single German was home, I went into the scullery, got a ladder and leant it against the back wall, below the windows of the locked room.

  Looking up at the white stones in which millions of suns smaller than pinheads were glinting, I climbed the rungs with a screwdriver and a pair of pincers in my belt, my shadow following me a little lower, like a monkey.

  “Hello! Are you the window-cleaner, perhaps?”

  I turned my head with my body leaning against the ladder and looked down.

  A man, hands on hips, was holding his head back to look up at me. Blinded as I was, I saw him in blurred triplicate, like a messy color print. He spoke German with an accent I didn’t know. I had never seen him before.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want a word with you!”

  He kept his hands on his hips, feet wide apart.

  After I had climbed back down, he lit a cigarette and peered into the distance.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Where are your papers?”

  He was wearing a rucksack and had two cameras, one on each hip. His eyes were black and so was his thin moustache. He studied me from head to toe before resting his gaze on my trousers while passing me a folded sheet of paper. I unfolded it. It was exactly the same permit as my own, with the same stamps on it. I didn’t bother to read his name. – I was no longer the only civilian allowed in this town! That was my only thought.

  I handed the piece of paper back to him.

  “I have another document as well,” he said and passed it to me. It was a letter confirming that he was the owner of a house (I didn’t recognize the address) and had permission to resume possession.

  I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I’m not familiar with that address. I don’t know this area very well.”

  “I do,” he said, “come with me.”

  “No. I am refusing you access to these premises. They have been requisitioned by the German Wehrmacht. I am the owner. No one else is allowed here.” Stupid lies: if nothing else, he had lived in the town; if nothing else, he knew the real owner. Even while speaking these bold words, I knew they wouldn’t help.

  He turned, took a few steps, looked at me, and walked towards the back door. I followed him, still holding his sheet of paper. Then he stopped abruptly and took a step back.

  “Those trousers you’re wearing don’t fit you very well. They are exactly my size, not yours.”

  I now made a serious attempt to read the name that had been filled in on the document. I had the impression it resembled the names I had seen on the pill bottles, the compacts, and the edges of the sheets.

  He went into the house, looked in the drawing room for a moment, then carried on upstairs as if I didn’t exist.

  In the bedroom he opened and closed the wardrobes. I waited to see if he would go into the closed room. But he sat down on the sill of the open window with his rucksack hanging out.

  “This is how you’re treated by your allies,” he said. “Call themselves officers! Stealing clothes!”

  He reached out to toss his cigarette into the garden.

  I had flopped down on the bed. I watched him silently as if he was a film being played just for me.

  “Your accent is peculiar,” he continued. “I can’t imagine you’re a German officer. I can’t imagine that a German officer would put on civilian clothes he found in a requisitioned house and then claim to be the owner of the house. I can’t imagine it!”

  “What’s that got to do
with me?”

  “I’ll give that some thought, shall I? I’ll leave this here for the moment.” He stood up, put the rucksack down on the floor, snatched the major general’s letter from my hand, and strolled out of the room.

  I stayed sitting there. The walls had resonated to the sound of his voice, the eyes in the paintings had turned toward him: he was the owner!

  A little later I thought I heard him in the garden. I stared at his rucksack. He was the owner. Then I got my rifle out from under the bed and crawled over to the window.

  He was standing on the edge of the lawn with his back to the house, next to the tall rhododendrons that had long since lost their flowers. Around that time more and more cats had been coming to the house. Almost every day another hungry stray arrived. They were lying spread out in the grass soaking up the sun: the black one I had rescued from the spa, a tabby, a ginger. They were asleep, not moving at all. The man was smoking a cigarette. He was holding his arm bent up like a V. Now and then blue smoke appeared in front of his face. I raised the rifle to my shoulder. The man’s head, the bead and the sight in a single straight line…

  There was a scream, close by, almost in my ear when I fired the shot. I let go of the rifle, which fell onto the window sill with a bang, then picked it up again immediately.

  A woman came out of the bathroom while I was still down on my knees. She shouted something in a language I didn’t understand. “Don’t get upset,” I said in German. “I was just checking the rifle. Then it went off.” I felt in my pocket for my handkerchief, but only found the screwdriver and the pincers. With the screwdriver in one hand, I made a few feints at the rifle in the other. The woman was wearing a raincoat, buttoned up to her chin. She didn’t have a hat on.

  Suddenly I burst out laughing, holding the rifle by the stock and lightly tapping my thigh with the screwdriver.

  “Where is my husband?” she asked in German. “Where is my husband? I have not seen him!”

  My fit of laughter now turned into a kind of hiccups and I started to get cramps in my stomach muscles. I hoped desperately that it would stop.

  “But you heard him,” I said. “You were in the bathroom, after all.”

  “Where is my husband? Please excuse me. I came inside without asking. Please excuse me.”

  She took a step towards me. Her thin, bleached hair was pulled back tight around her head.

  “Stay away from the window,” I said. “Stay away from the window!” I raised the rifle, let it go, and grabbed it again near the breech.

  No, no, she shook her head, retreating to the bathroom. She grabbed the drapes and shot behind them.

  I took such a deep breath I felt it in my groin. Then I bent down, slid the rifle and the screwdriver under the bed, and pulled out my bayonet. Long strips of sunlight lay on the part of the floor I had to cross to reach the bathroom. I didn’t know how best to hold the bayonet: ahead, clenched in my fist, or behind my back. But the sun faded, the original colors of the carpet reappeared, and I went into the bathroom. She was standing in the furthermost corner by the window that looked out on the pollarded plane tree in the front garden. The red grease of a lipstick was protruding from a gold tube she was holding in her hand. She slid it in with her thumbnail and put it in her handbag without looking, without closing the bag. Her eyes were fixed on me alone, her mouth half-open like the varnished papier-mâché mouth of a mask.

  “What did I do, what did I do, why are you shouting at me?” she asked, in a voice that sounded like she was choking.

  I walked around the bath with the bayonet behind my back. Her perfume reached me in clouds, as if her skin was white-hot and vaporizing everything at once. I tossed the bayonet aside, wrapped my hands around her neck and squeezed. I pushed her away from me, into the corner, without looking at her. She didn’t do anything in reply. I even stopped breathing; I wanted to turn to stone so that she could never free herself again. That was what I thought, while staring out through the window and not moving. Driving along the road was one of those German trucks with rattling iron tracks that were actually meant for the desert. The harder I squeezed the more feeling I got in my fingers. The cartilage of her voice box would leave an X-ray image on my hands. Her skin bulged up between my nails. The German half-track disappeared behind the window post. A sparrow alighted on the window ledge, jiggled its tail and flew off, leaving a plaster penny. But the woman still wasn’t dead. She tried to kick me. I forced her down and bashed the back of her head on the rim of the bath until I heard something crack. Now she was no longer moving.

  I looked at the woman and dropped her on the floor. Her eyes were half closed, her pale tongue sticking out between her lips. She shouldn’t look like that, I thought. I hoisted her up over the side of the bath, turned on the cold tap, and sprinkled water on her face. But I didn’t succeed in closing her mouth. Big stains appeared on her coat. Wet, her bottle-blond hair stuck to her head; it looked like she had already lost quite a lot of it. I laid her down on the marble tiles and went back to the bedroom to look out the window.

  The sun broke through over the back garden. The cats hadn’t moved. The man was lying face down in the rhododendrons. Actually only his feet were visible. I thought, the Germans almost never go there. They won’t notice him. He should stay there for the time being. If I go and hide him now and the Germans come home and see me, they’ll know I have something to do with it. But if they find him like that without my being anywhere nearby, they won’t even think of me. But they won’t find him; they never go into the back garden. This evening they’ll be tired.

  A four-engine bomber flew low overhead. The shadow of a wing brushed the man’s feet as if to draw attention to them.

  I backed off from the window and stood on the threshold of the bathroom. The bayonet was closest. Then, a little further away, her handbag and behind that the woman herself, half visible. I went over to her, grabbed her under the arms, dragged her to the bedroom, and laid her on the left of the twin beds.

  Then I picked up the bayonet and her handbag, which I clicked shut. There were no more signs of what had happened in the marble bathroom. I laid the bayonet by the rifle and put her handbag on a chair, as if she had been sitting there and had stood up for a moment. I didn’t look to see what was in it. I left the man’s rucksack where he had put it down.

  I lay down on the other bed and felt her cheek. It was not yet any colder than my own. I slid her eyelids down; her eyes closed further than the eyes of someone who is sleeping.

  Then I sat up with my back to her, my forehead in my hands. This bowl of bone covered with its lid and its movable hide, this was where it all came from: the other people, the world, the war, the dreams, the words, the deeds that seemed to happen so automatically it was impossible to imagine ever having been capable of thinking things through; as automatically as if one’s deeds were the world’s thoughts. You would need a second head to understand what that first head was, but I only had one, here in my hands, holding it in a way people never hold anything else. Yet, if not for the claims of scholars, you wouldn’t know your head was any different from your hand or foot.

  Explosions began to sound. Armored vehicles drove through them with chains jangling.

  When it was dark enough, I went into the back garden. Not a single German had come home. If they drove into the garden in this moment, they wouldn’t notice me in the dark. On the horizon I could see the pale light of artillery.

  I pulled the man out of the shrubs by his feet until his whole body was on the lawn. His cameras rode up over his head. I turned him over, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him across the grass to the summer house, laying him down behind it. Whoever found him would wonder for a moment how it had happened, rob him, shrug, and maybe get someone to bury him.

  The house was as dark as when I’d come outside. Still no sign of the Germans. I could forget about the day’s exertions. I would take the woma
n downstairs and put her next to her husband. Tomorrow morning it would be like nothing had happened. I looked up at the stars, the rumbling of cannon fire in my ears. Stay here forever, I thought, where nothing can happen. If the whole world disappears, I won’t even notice as long as this house, this grass, and all the things I can see around me stay the same.

  But when I reached the upstairs hallway I saw a glow. And that glow was coming from the room that had always been closed. I immediately realized that I had been walking around the whole time with a dagger in my belly and that dagger had now been shoved straight up into my heart. My blood left its usual streams and eddied round as if in a barrel.

  I held on tight to the banister. The door was ajar. I couldn’t hear anything. Maybe there wasn’t anyone, maybe someone had just been here and left a lamp behind. With my hands stretched out in front of me, I approached the door. A key was stuck in the lock with the rest of the bunch dangling from it. I was unarmed. I was approaching the end. It had always been there in that room and now it had been jimmied open like a box of dynamite. I took the key out of the lock and pushed the door further open. A cat yowled in pain. I saw its eyes surrounded by glitters of light as if in a black anthracite cavern; the light was coming from all sides.

  But it had a single source, it was all coming from one lamp and that lamp was being held by a man.

  The man was standing on a stepladder with his back to me. He hadn’t heard me walk in. He raised his oil lamp and stuck his other hand into something. I saw what it was. It was an aquarium. All four walls were covered with racks of aquariums.

  “Who are you!” I yelled. But the man didn’t even turn his head toward me. I only heard the bubbling of water and distant shooting outside. Then I took a few steps until I was next to him and tugged on his trouser leg.

  “Are you deaf?”

  Without giving any signs of fright, he turned on the narrow stepladder, withdrawing his hand in the process. It was trembling and a few drops fell from his fingers onto my face. The cat jumped up against him. The man bent to push it away, ignoring me completely as if I had been walking in and out the whole time and he had nothing left to say to me.