by Hans Keilson
Marie found this surprising, abrupt, even a little rash.
But Wim said, “That makes sense, Nico”—and he extended his hand to him across the table—“That makes sense. In the end we won’t be able to stand on ceremony here for long. We have to live together. My name is Wim, and this is Marie.”
Marie shook hands with him too.
Then she poured him another cup of tea.
“We also have a place for you to hide, Nico, in your room.”
A light shone across his face. All the little wrinkles were lively when he laughed. He timidly began to realize his good fortune.
“We’ll show you tomorrow. It’s a little complicated—it’s too late tonight.”
“Good, Wim, that sounds good.”
“Tonight there’s nothing you need to worry about. No one’s looking for you here.”
“I’m not scared, Wim.”
“If we’re a little bit clever, and careful, then you can stay here and there’ll be nothing for you to worry about.”
“I hope that I’m not causing any difficulties for you—for you and Marie. I don’t know how long it’s still going to last.”
“No one does, Nico. For your sake, I hope it won’t be too much longer.” Wim stood up. “I think we’ll go—”
“Not just for my sake,” Nico interjected, and grew serious. Now it was clear that he was much older than Wim . . . “There are so many, so many . . .” It sounded like the simple, honest truth.
Wim hesitated. He understood Nico’s tone well. “You’re right—for everyone who’s in your situation, here or wherever—”
“And it’s not just Jews,” Nico added. He stood up. He had said what needed to be said!
“That’s true too,” Wim answered. “Now I’ll show you your room.”
“Good night, Marie.”
“Sleep well, Nico, your first night here . . .”
“What time should I get up in the morning?”
“Yes, when?”—now she hesitated and then smiled a little, with compassion. “Well, you have time. I’ll bring your tea up to you.”
“Thank you.”
Carrying all the things, the two men went upstairs.
IV.
Another hour and a half to go!
Wim sat downstairs in the back room as usual. He had shut the sliding doors to the other room. Books and notebooks lay spread out on the table in front of him; he was preparing for an exam, and had been for a long time, so that he could get a higher and better-paid position. At the moment he was taking a break. He had turned his chair a little toward the stove and he had a newspaper on his knee to hold the tobacco for the cigarette he was rolling.
Marie stood in the kitchen and did the washing. She had fetched the underwear, stockings, and other things out of the laundry basket, even though it was so late at night. Whenever it was a question of regaining her inner calm and equilibrium, she did laundry and cleaned the house. Wim knew that. Tomorrow it would be the upstairs room’s turn. After all, a dead man had lain there.
Tomorrow, maybe early in the morning, the police would find him too. That is how he would eventually get a proper burial. Later, if someone asked—but who, in God’s name! he had no one left!—they could dig him up again and give him a gravestone with his real name. In a moment of familiarity and trust he had revealed it: Bram Cohen, born ———, died ———. For them he had been Nico.
“I want to live to see the end, Wim. What do you think?”
“Why wouldn’t you, Nico?” It was long before his illness. “We all want that. And if we don’t get a bomb on our roof before then . . .”
In fact, he hadn’t meant anything with his reference to bombs. It was a kind of cosmic resignation.
“Do you think they’ll still come?” —“They” were the others, on the other side of the Channel. The invasion! He was counting on it!
Wim stuck out his lower lip, raised his eyebrows, pulled his head a little way back into his neck so that his shoulders stuck out more sharply—a face that expressed everything going on inside him: I don’t know, Nico . . . (Obviously, who could pretend to know with any certainty) . . . I don’t really think so . . . (Better not to count on it, so that you could only be pleasantly surprised) . . . but I hope so . . . (That would finally, finally mean the end of this sh–—) . . .
“It’s too late now, Wim. —Isn’t it too late for a lot of people?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” Wim had to agree. It was enough to make you lose your patience.
Silence.
Nico sank back into his thoughts. He looked old and gray then, a tired little bird, not at all like a traveling perfume salesman. He got too little fresh air. The few short walks in the evening, in the dark of the new moon . . . He wore old worn-out clothing meant for around the house, just something thrown together, green-gray pants, a blue shirt, mends and patches everywhere on the elbows and knees. He usually didn’t put on a tie. By evening his beard had visibly grown back. At first he had shaved twice a day.
“It’s lucky my parents were already dead.”
“Yes, Nico, that is lucky for them.”
“For me too. What would I have done?” After a little while: “They carried off old people, in cattle cars, the elderly, the sick . . . That’s not just a story.”
Wim knew that too. That is why he was careful not to discuss too fully things that were known only too well. It was dangerous.
“Cigarette, Nico?”
“Thanks.”
Light.
“Thank you, Wim.”
The first few draws in silence. Then: “This is good tobacco. Where can you still get it?”
And Wim told him the story of the tobacco: “Dutch grown,” he said with a grin, “smuggled to Belgium, fermented there and perfumed up with some sort of juice, then smuggled back.”
For a little while Nico’s thoughts rambled along the Belgian border. He leaned back in his chair while Wim went on telling him about it.
“Whole fortunes cross over the border like that. If the two of us had even half of one of them, Nico . . .”
“What then, Wim, what then?” He would gladly give up his share if that would make the war end tomorrow.
“Last week I talked to a businessman friend from Eindhoven,” Wim said, and lit another cigarette. “You wouldn’t believe what crosses the border—from illegal people to illegal herds of sheep—everything, everything is transported there and back again.”
“In the last war it was exactly the same.”
“I wouldn’t know that.”
“But I can still remember, my father told me about it one time.”
“My father,” he had said. It sounded so strange coming out of his mouth. It meant at the same time his father’s father too, and his father before him, as if someone had accidentally struck a bell and all the other bells began to resonate with it, the bells that over the course of many generations had been cast from the same metal, all the way back to the beginning.
He took a few puffs and contemplatively exhaled into the smoky room. Two, three cigarettes like this in a single evening—what a luxury!
“And if they get caught, Wim?”
“With a herd of sheep they’d lose twenty, thirty thousand guilders. But the next transport makes it up again.”
“And for people, when they get caught?”
“It depends whether it’s pilots from English planes that were shot down . . .”
“What? That happens too?”
“Of course, Nico. Then they travel disguised as mutes, as a transport of mutes for labor deployment.”
They had to laugh when they pictured it: these young, strapping men, a deaf-mute labor deployment!
“And the others?”
“That seems to be well organized too. Anyone who gets across is saved. Belgium is only under military control, there’s not a civilian governor like here.”
“Are you saying you think I should try it too—?” Nico said suddenly, because he had recent
ly gotten a piece of paper that proved that he was such and such a person. False papers, of course, but still, if you didn’t hold it right under the quartz lamp . . . But why, in truth, was he asking? It was his quiet fear. He was always afraid that one day Wim wouldn’t answer right away, that he would act like he was thinking it over and then calmly, apparently objectively, say, “That’s something you’d have to consider very carefully.” He almost expected it. So now and then Nico prodded him with a little test. The feeling came over him like some sort of feverish illness that he was a burden, that the others had had enough of him and wanted to be rid of him at last. Even though no one had ever given him the least indication of such a thing, these imagined thoughts of the others held him in their grip: “If we didn’t have him here, we could . . .” Or: “Well, we have one too . . . it’s not so simple. And it’s dangerous too . . .” Or . . . It is like a sickness affecting the thoughts of people in hiding, it destroys their naturalness and makes them rude or weak. Few are left unaffected.
But Wim interrupted him: “No, Nico, it’s better that you not stick your nose out into the daylight.” With all the strict checkpoints! There’s a four-hour train ride before you get to the border. Besides, anyone could tell just by looking at him. “I wouldn’t take the chance.”
Had Nico even heard? Yes, yes, but his thoughts were already racing further. They rode with the trains heading east with no stops, they ran through the camps, those whorehouses of death, slipped into the cells and chambers, saw all the way to the end, to the—
And then he said: “They better be quick about it, Wim, or it’ll be too late for us too.”
This was the deepest point that he could reach. And he reached it often—only too often.
“Ach, Nico,” Wim said, and leaned back in his chair. At the same moment he wished he were sixty and the other man forty. Then it would have been easier. But even so he couldn’t have kept it from ending like this—
It was so cold at night. Wim threw wood and peat into the stove, and together they gave off a pleasant warmth that quickly grew stronger. And that delicate, spicy smoke.
Marie appeared in the doorway. She had pushed it open with her elbow and was drying her wet hands on a kitchen towel. Her face shone with effort and her eyes were still red.
“Wim, I was thinking—”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking—maybe you’ll think, Why is she mentioning this now?”
“What are you thinking? Just say it . . . Come on, sit down.”
“No. I’m not finished in the kitchen yet . . . What’ll happen with his things?”
“What kind of things?”
“You know, Nico’s—his clothes, his underwear—”
Wim gave out a short, pitying laugh. “Well, he didn’t have much.”
“No, not much. Should I wash them tomorrow? Or . . .”
“Yes, just wait until tomorrow.”
“Coba’s coming tomorrow, I’ll ask her,” Marie said, and she shut the door again. Coba had already helped them often, she would know what to do with the clothes too.
Yes, Coba knew, of course, and so did Marie’s mother, and Leen and his friend Leo, who did all sorts of useful things for people in hiding. It could not be avoided—the narrow circle that Marie had imagined at first had been pierced. It happened practically on its own. And so did the other thing. It was unexpected—or maybe not, in the end, totally unexpected. Just a small event, but still a harbinger, an ambassador that the great event, the daily occurrence, had sent as a reminder, since it itself was almost invisible, as if happening between the lines. A wind that also blows in from the sea during the summer, just a little fuller now, and more biting, so that you shiver a little, a cloud that it brings along when September comes, outlined a little more sharply and not so shining and transparent anymore. Or like a faint illness, hardly worth going to bed for, which has already welcomed death into the house.
The three of them had lived together for five months already, wary and often tense, but still, it was normal life. Like every group where one person is dependent on the others, it straightens itself out and finds the guiding star under which everyone can live together.
“He’d rather eat upstairs today,” Marie said, still a bit disturbed by what had happened. She poured the thick pea soup into the deep soup plate and put it on the tray, where a glass of water was already standing.
Wim quietly lifted up his own still empty plate, weighed it gently with his fingertips, and then put it carefully down again on the table, a little farther to the left.
Then Marie brought the meal to his room.
“So, you told him,” Wim said when she appeared downstairs again. He slowly massaged his thighs with his two hands, and his torso moved back and forth with the same rhythm.
“Yes, this afternoon. He seems to have suspected something like that himself. Suddenly he asked me himself, why—”
“And . . . ?” Wim interrupted her. His impatience betrayed him.
But there was no “And,” none at all. Marie put the empty tray on a chair near the door and stepped closer to the table.
They had caught Jop and taken him in three days ago; he had fallen into a trap—he was careless, he was betrayed, who could say? That kind of thing happened, unfortunately, all too often these days. Those were the stakes everyone had to play for if they took part in the game at all. They had searched his house, looking for papers that would incriminate him. Now he was in Amsterdam, sitting in an infamous police prison, and no one knew if he would get through the “cross-examination” alive. He didn’t need to say much; people were so modest, they were satisfied with just a little, a tiny little bit of evidence—just the tiniest little pebble, high in the mountains, that worked loose and fell and in falling would grow into an avalanche.
Marie and Wim were warned as well, too late in any case; the danger had already passed. They discussed whether or not to tell Nico the news—whether it wasn’t, in fact, better to get him out of their house for a while. Two days later the report came that Jop was in jail with the so-called “light” cases. So there was nothing to fear, for now. But still, you had to be on your guard. That was when they decided to tell Nico.
“Ach,” Marie began, “he actually stayed rather calm.” She faltered. “He was scared.” She fell silent again. It took her a long time to find the words to express what she had, to her horror, perceived.
She had seen fear: the terrible helpless fear that rises up out of sadness and despair and is no longer attached to anything—the helpless fear that is tied only to nothingness. Not fear or anxiety or despair about a person or a situation, nothing, nothing, only the exposure, the vulnerability, being cast loose from all certainties, from all dignity and all love. The man offered it up to her so shamelessly that it felt to Marie like she was seeing him physically naked. No cry out loud, no contortion of his face or his hands, he was simply uncovered, he stood in the middle of the room, the focal point and bull’s-eye for all the poisoned arrows being shot at him from beyond life. And Marie understood that words like “love your neighbor” or “national duty” or “civil disobedience” were only a weak reflection of this deepest feeling that Wim and she had felt back then: wanting to shelter a persecuted human being in their house. Like the way people veil a body in fabric and clothing so that the blaze of its nakedness does not blind too deeply the eyes that see it, people veil life itself with precious garments, behind which, as under ashes, the double-tongued fire of creation smolders. Love, beauty, dignity: all that was only put on, so that whoever approached the glowing embers in reverence would not singe his grasping hands and thirsting lips. But wherever violence and annihilation tore away the protective covering, the undaunted heart was thrown into turmoil and could not rest until new costumes had formed, new threads had been spun, to mask and raise up what was shameful and unbearable.
He, too, the man standing so pale before her who had shut his eyes for a moment, felt the look she was giving him. He whispered: “
I’d felt so safe here, so safe.”
He did not speak Jop’s name. But Marie saw that he was still thinking about him and that he had included him in his own—purported—safety and security. She was almost ashamed that she had to be witness to all this.
She had no words for any of it. She said: “He was afraid, of course, for all of us—for Jop, for himself, for us. Maybe not in that order exactly, but what’s the difference?”
“Strange,” said Wim, “I would have bet that . . . Didn’t he say anything else?”
“Should we eat first?”
She sat down. Then she continued: “He suggested to me that he look for another place.”
“How could he think such a thing,” Wim asked, a little aggressively. “He wants to just go out onto the street, not knowing where? I hope you told him, Marie.”
Marie started to fill the bowls and, in her mind, was already back in the kitchen. She was thinking about the pieces of meat she had always used to put into her soups, which made them so especially tasty. When would they have meat in their soup again?
They started to eat. “I’ll talk to him later,” Wim said.
“Tonight he won’t be coming downstairs again, I’m sure.”
“Then I’ll go upstairs.” Silence. “Did you also tell him that his ration cards are taken care of?”
“I forgot,” Marie said, and she let her spoon fall back into the meatless soup. “I never even thought of that.”
And Wim said slowly, without looking up, “He won’t be eating a single bite of his food up there.”
“I’ll go right now,” Marie cried, a little ashamed, and she flew up the stairs. She didn’t stay long.
“You were right, Wim,” she announced when she came back to the table, slightly flushed. “Everything was standing exactly as I brought it to him, untouched.”
“Maybe it was still too hot for him,” Wim said, and he blew on his soup-filled spoon for a long time before carefully bringing it to his mouth.
That evening he had a talk with Nico.