The Krull House

by Georges Simenon

  In the Krull house, nobody was ever offered a drink, but Monsieur Schoof kept a decanter of cognac and a box of cigars in the dresser.

  ‘I’ve come to ask your advice, Herr Schoof. I’ve had some bad news about my father, and I can’t bother my Uncle Cornelius.’

  Poor Monsieur Schoof, with his round eyes, was already a resigned victim.

  ‘As you may know, my father, who’s frowned on by those in power in our country, asked me to cross the border with most of his money. It was the main reason for my journey. Only, I’ve had to leave the money temporarily in a bank in Belgium, because I was afraid of problems at the French border.’

  Monsieur Schoof was listening with one ear, unable to stop himself from also listening to the noises of the shop, the bell at the entrance, the clatter of the till.

  ‘My father has been arrested and taken to a concentration camp. They may shoot him. They may just see to it that he disappears.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ Monsieur Schoof felt obliged to sigh.

  ‘That’s why I have to get him out. I’ve spoken to some specialists, and they’re asking me for five thousand francs, which I have to wire this evening to an address we’ve agreed on. I don’t have time to go to Belgium to withdraw the money from the bank. And if I tell my Uncle Cornelius …’

  Monsieur Schoof hadn’t yet moved, didn’t seem to have grasped the point of this story.

  ‘I thought that for forty-eight hours you could do me this service …’

  Monsieur Schoof showed no enthusiasm. He heaved a little sigh, almost looked at his young interlocutor, doubtless told himself it was pointless, that there was no getting out of it, and headed for the till.

  From the other end of the counter, Marguerite saw him handling large-denomination notes, understood and threw Hans a curious look.

  ‘I’ll be back the day after tomorrow, Herr Schoof …’

  He was again speaking German in the shop, and to cut short the conversation, Monsieur Schoof dived under the counter.

  Hans didn’t yet know what he would do with the 5,000 francs. It was an idea that had simply popped into his head as he had stood looking at the shop, and in the same way he now stopped in front of a yellow poster announcing a big concert at the Conservatoire that evening.

  He went in and bought two orchestra tickets. When he got back to Quai Saint-Léonard and opened the door of the shop, hearing with the same pleasure as ever the deep-pitched sound of the bell, glancing at the white lion advertising Remy Starch as if saying hello to it, he didn’t notice that his Aunt Maria was turning to him anxiously, or that she was following him into the kitchen, or that Anna stopped working and wiped her hands, questioning him with her eyes.

  He had almost forgotten about the police station. His aunt was obliged to ask:

  ‘What was it all about?’

  ‘Nothing much. They wanted to know if my papers were in order. Apparently, you’re the ones who are in trouble, because you didn’t declare that you had a lodger … By the way, if Liesbeth wants to go to a concert, I have two tickets …’

  He realized that they were astonished by the twenty-franc orchestra seats and were sure to ask him where he had got the money. To simplify things, he said:

  ‘I ran into a compatriot of mine. He’d bought the tickets but now he has to leave this evening …’

  It wasn’t over. He had started something that was more complicated than he had thought. Aunt Maria and Anna looked at each other questioningly, worried about letting Liesbeth go out alone with her cousin, but on the other hand uncomfortable at the thought of seeing twenty-franc tickets go to waste.

  ‘What time will it finish?’

  He almost replied:

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  It didn’t matter, since he wouldn’t be going to the Conservatoire! Or anywhere else! They didn’t need to get into a state about it: he wasn’t going to do anything to Liesbeth this evening!

  No, all he wanted to do was walk with her and chat. It had suddenly occurred to him that they had never really talked. He had chosen the concert quite by chance, as an excuse, and now it had set the whole household in motion. There was the question of what Liesbeth was going to wear: they would have to iron her blue satin dress and buy new stockings in the neighbourhood!

  ‘Is she going out in a long dress?’ he asked.

  ‘To the Conservatoire, always! Especially in the orchestra seats.’

  Too bad! That’s how it was, and at eight o’clock they were both waiting for the tram at the corner, Liesbeth bare-headed, her hair freshly curled with tongs (she still smelled of burned hair!), a raincoat over her dress, the dress itself skimming the ground.

  ‘Aren’t we going to the Conservatoire?’ she said in surprise when he got off the tram two stops further on.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then where are we going?’

  ‘Nowhere!’

  He smiled at her cheerfully, as if he had given her a wonderful gift. He even took her hand and walked holding it, like a normal lover.

  ‘I was starting to get bored,’ he said.

  She misunderstood, obviously, and apologized, humble and timid:

  ‘The house isn’t much fun.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful house. Don’t you like it? As far as I’m concerned, just smelling the wicker … Then, when you open the door to the shop …’

  She wasn’t sure if he was joking, but he wasn’t.

  ‘And everything in its place. The cups with their brown bottoms hanging from the shelves on the dresser, each with its own little brass hook …’

  There was always a certain formality in the way he spoke to her. It wasn’t out of respect, but rather a sense of distance.

  They reached the town centre. The sky had gradually grown lower until it almost touched the roofs of the houses, a cotton-white sky dimmed by the evening and suddenly turning into a fog-like drizzle.

  ‘Let’s have a drink. Why don’t you sit down there, Liesbeth?’

  He had caught sight of the terrace of the Grand Café, with its open plate-glass windows, its motionless waiters, napkins in their hands, and musicians who could be seen on a stage inside, tuning up their instruments and attaching a number to a rail.

  ‘Waiter!’

  He just had to cry ‘waiter’ to be noticed by the whole terrace and for everyone to know that he was German, but he didn’t care. On the contrary, it was as if he took pleasure in feeling as foreign as possible.

  ‘Give me a beer and a glass of cognac.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yes, together, and a liqueur for mademoiselle.’

  ‘You want the beer at the same time as the cognac?’ the waiter insisted.

  Hans took the trouble to explain to Liesbeth:

  ‘That’s how we drink where I come from. Don’t you do that at home?’

  ‘We never drink spirits or beer.’

  After which, he took almost as long to tune up as the orchestra. Finicky, annoyed at not immediately finding the inner and outer mood he was looking for, he sent for cigarettes, refused them and sent the messenger boy back to the tobacconist’s, and drank three beers and three glasses of brandy before he felt good.

  But then he felt really good, sitting back in his rattan armchair, soaking in the atmosphere.

  The drizzle was only visible around the white globes lighting the terrace, and it was more like a luminous dust that was immediately absorbed by the darkness. But the dust was also on the ground, on the black, polished cobbles, except for those under the canopy, which formed a clear rectangle.

  The musicians were playing a Viennese waltz with the heavy sentimentality typical of café orchestras. A couple nearby, the man in a bowler hat, the woman with her two hands together on a reticule with a silver clasp, spent a good part of the evening motionless, listening.

  Liesbeth didn’t dare say a word. She sensed that this was a delicate time, as delicate as the moment they had spent standing silently by the window the previous night. />
  Never before had the man beside her been so mysterious, so attractive, so formidable.

  ‘I haven’t yet told you how my father died,’ he said suddenly, as if the story were part of a repertoire. ‘It was quite curious! My father was a strange character. You know he was a cobbler, don’t you? … Have you ever been to Emden?’

  ‘I’ve never been outside this town.’

  ‘He had a shop beneath the Rathaus. The old palace has arcades, and under these arcades there’s a line of shops … One fine day, my mother left. We never found out what became of her, and some claim they met her in America …’

  He was juggling with his characters, his ghosts, mixing them with present realities, the drizzle, the globes of light alive with moths, and even his cousin’s tense profile, even her sharp nose, which reminded him of a little girl in Emden in the days when he played in the streets.

  ‘My father at that time was like Cornelius, just as inscrutable, just as severe. He could sit with his leather knife and his awl from six in the morning to eight in the evening, by the window, which was never clean, and not feel any curiosity about what was happening beyond his rectangle of street, beyond the shop on the corner that sold dolls … Waiter!’

  ‘Same again?’

  ‘Beer and cognac. The cognac in a larger glass!’

  She had never seen him drink before and she was worried, especially when he raised his voice and everyone looked at him. In addition, she was embarrassed by the attention her evening dress was attracting.

  ‘Some say my father won the lottery, but I don’t believe that. He never told me about it, because he believed you should never talk about money, that it’s the most secret thing there is. What I think happened is that he did well speculating on the mark, which a lot of people did in those days. He bought a shop in Bergenstrasse, with thousands of shoes in cardboard boxes and two girls in black aprons to serve the customers.’

  From time to time, a tram stopped abruptly and left again almost immediately.

  ‘Strange, really! Sidonie also worked in a shoe shop.’

  Liesbeth shuddered: she hadn’t anticipated that they would end up talking about the girl found dead in the canal.

  ‘I met her,’ he continued, following the awkward flight of a moth.

  ‘Who, Sidonie?’

  ‘My father’s girl. A redhead with a big beauty spot on her chin. He only had eyes for her. Everything revolved around her. He’d spend all day in the shop, hovering over her, and people noticed. I think they were sleeping together …’

  ‘Hans!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your father!’

  ‘So what? When I say “I think”, I mean I’m not sure. He was stupid enough to let himself be led by the nose without getting anything in return! … She went out every evening with a clerk from an insurance company who made no bones about picking her up from the shop and looking my father in the eyes as he did so … The first time he tried to kill himself, he threw himself in the dock …’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes. They fished him out, although he struggled … The girl’s name was Eva, I remember. He could have afforded any girl he wanted. I’m sure that apart from my mother he hadn’t slept with any other woman. And Eva, on top of everything else, had that redhead smell … The fact remains, he did manage to kill himself. The second time, he made sure. He climbed on to the parapet of the swing bridge with a rope around his neck and a big stone tied to his feet, and before he jumped he shot himself in the head.’

  Hans laughed, and she looked at him uneasily, a painful sense of dread in her chest.

  ‘There you are!’ he concluded.

  And, without transition:

  ‘Has Joseph had lots of girlfriends?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She was lying. He could sense it.

  ‘Answer me,’ he insisted spitefully.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s had lots, but he had one. She was the maid at the Guérins’.’

  ‘The carpenter next door?’

  ‘They didn’t really talk about it in front of me. I was only just twelve.’

  ‘So Joseph was nineteen … Did he get her pregnant?’

  ‘No!’ she protested, turning to make sure that nobody was listening.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Joseph was a sleepwalker. He always has been. When he was little, they put bars on his bedroom window, for fear he’d kill himself. Once, they found him near the lock, and he claimed that a boat had been demanding to be let through for an hour and had stopped him from sleeping … Am I boring you, Hans?’

  ‘Go on!’

  It was amusing, her fear of displeasing him and at the same time the anxious glances she kept casting around her!

  ‘You know the back of the house. At that time Joseph’s room looked out on the yard. One night Mother woke up and saw him walking along the stone ledge that runs across the two houses, the Guérins’ and ours. She didn’t dare say anything. She thought he was sleepwalking. Then he went into one of the rooms. The next day, she went to see the Guérins, and the maid was dismissed. Joseph was sick for a month and had to be sent to the country …’

  Hans let out a little laugh that wasn’t his usual laugh, perhaps because of everything he had already drunk.

  ‘Do you think I’m like Joseph?’ he asked her point-blank, turning his face towards her.

  ‘No! Definitely not!’

  ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong. I am like Joseph, or rather, Joseph is like me … You wouldn’t understand the difference … Joseph could have been me and I could have been Joseph. Just as your mother could have been Pipi—’

  ‘Hans!’ she ventured to protest against this blasphemy.

  ‘Your mother is so aware of it that she doesn’t dare throw Pipi out, even when she insults her. And I bet there are even times when your mother envies her!’

  ‘Pipi?’

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  He laughed again. This was a really good evening! The orchestra was playing some Schubert, and one of the waiters had side whiskers just like in the old days. The streets were so empty by now that you could hear footsteps in the next neighbourhood, make out the route people were taking through the little streets and predict the moment when they would stop and insert their keys in their locks.

  ‘Would you follow me anywhere?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  She blushed. She didn’t dare reply:

  ‘Because I love you!’

  But her hand awkwardly searched for his hand, and she squeezed his fingers tight.

  ‘You’d follow me because you’re bored at home, isn’t that so?’

  ‘That’s not the reason, Hans!’

  ‘How did you see the future before you met me?’

  ‘I don’t know … I’m studying to be a piano teacher.’

  ‘And Joseph to be a doctor!’

  ‘Yes … I would probably have stayed in the neighbourhood, but a bit closer to town.’

  She felt like crying, for no particular reason. It seemed to her that all of a sudden Hans was trying to diminish her, to diminish her love.

  ‘Why do you ask me that?’

  ‘Who would you have married, for example?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A shopkeeper? A clerk? … Joseph is expected to marry Mademoiselle Schoof, isn’t he?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Does he love her?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘There you are!’ he said smugly, for the second time since they had sat down on the terrace.

  As if he had just successfully performed a conjuring trick, or solved a difficult problem on the blackboard!

  QED!

  ‘Shall we go home, Hans?’

  ‘Absolutely not!’

  ‘The concert must be over by now.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  He took his handkerchief from his pocket and at the same time took out the five 1,
000 franc notes and put them down, all crumpled, on the table.

  ‘Hans!’

  She was looking at him with that same dread, hardly daring to speak.

  ‘Hans! This money …’

  ‘What of it?’

  He was more and more cheerful, although his eyes were too shiny.

  ‘True, I could have stolen it!’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have bothered me. But I didn’t. Monsieur Schoof gave it to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I asked him. I wanted money in my pocket. Even if only so that the two of us could leave if things didn’t work out.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘All kinds of things. You never know.’

  ‘He gave you all that money, just like that?’

  ‘Just like that, yes! I told him a story. It would take too long to explain … Waiter!’

  He paid with a large-denomination note, then changed his mind and asked for another glass of cognac, heedless of his cousin’s reproachful look.

  ‘That’s how I see life!’ he declared, getting to his feet.

  He knocked over a chair as they left the terrace, then turned to look at the café all lit up, two elderly men playing backgammon in a corner, the woman at the till starting to cash up.

  ‘It’s late, Hans. I bet it’s nearly midnight.’

  She reached for his arm, took little steps to keep up with him, didn’t quite know what to say, or how to deal with him.

  He was the cock of the walk and she was merely a little chicken who wasn’t yet used to it, as terrified as she was attracted.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked anxiously, as he turned into a dark street.

  ‘We’re walking home via the quayside.’

  ‘It’s late, Hans!’

  He really didn’t care. He lit a cigarette and said:

  ‘I don’t know anything more arousing than the sight of a couple in some dark corner at night. You don’t know quite what they’re doing. You can imagine all kinds of things. You can almost smell their saliva, and something else …’

  ‘Hans!’

  ‘When Joseph sees that, his fingers start shaking.’

  ‘Have you seen him do that?’

  ‘Oh, yes! He’d like to be in the man’s shoes, in the shoes of all men who make love. He’d like to undress every woman, caress her …’