‘Serve the coffee, Liesbeth.’
She dropped a cup, which broke the spell, at least long enough for her mother to be able to say:
‘What are you doing? You’re all fingers and thumbs these days!’
Joseph turned. His Adam’s apple was going up and down. He headed for the other door, the one that led to the corridor and the stairs.
‘Aren’t you having your coffee?’
He hesitated, then decided he wouldn’t.
‘I’m going upstairs.’
‘You should rest a little.’
She didn’t really think that. She knew it wasn’t possible. But she had to pretend, at least for Cornelius.
The most worrying thing was that, after finishing his coffee, it was the old man’s custom to stand in the doorway of the shop for a while, smoking his pipe.
Today was no different. Germaine was still opposite, with her horrible red hat. Just then, a little slip of a girl was starting to write something in chalk on the wall of the house. She had only written the first letter. The arrival of Cornelius made her run away with a cry of terror. Making a detour, she joined the others on the central reservation.
Against all expectation, it was Hans who from time to time sought Aunt Maria’s eyes, it was with Hans that she was having something like a silent conversation.
‘This is serious, isn’t it?’ she seemed to be saying.
He was making no attempt to persuade her of the contrary. If she could, she would already have asked him:
‘What are we going to do?’
Even though there was still nothing, just a broken windowpane that had immediately been replaced, a drunk woman rousing the bargees near the lock and a little girl with a woman’s calves and buttocks standing outside the house, enjoying the spectacle of her new-found importance!
When Cornelius came back inside, they were worried about what he was going to say, how he would react. But there was no reaction at all. He still had his ivory complexion, his grey eyes under grey eyebrows, his stiff beard, and his slippers slid over the floor as he crossed the kitchen, just like any other day, put his pipe back on the rack and headed for the workshop.
It was Liesbeth who yielded first and cried out:
‘She’s not going away!’
‘Calm down,’ her mother murmured. ‘Don’t keep showing yourself.’
And for a while she remained motionless, her eyes half closed, her lips alone moving regularly: her hands joined across her belly, she was praying over the uncleared table, over her plate on which there were seven plum stones.
Then a piercing voice echoed in the crystalline air, a shrill, vulgar working-class woman’s voice:
‘Germaine! … Germaine!’
The second syllable was dragged out. The monster in the red hat replied, just as shrilly:
‘Coming, Mum!’
And the group in front of the house melted away. The only person remaining was Potut, with his bad feet, who headed straight for the nearest bench. The area was clear but for the trees and the stones, on which the sun played.
Maria Krull sighed and looked at Hans in relief.
She had said, seeing him grab his jacket:
‘I don’t think you should go out, Hans!’
He had only reflected for a moment and had decided to stay.
They were trying hard to act as they did on other days. Liesbeth was playing the piano in the lounge, although her mother had wondered if it was right, on such a day, for music to issue forth from the house like that.
‘People will get tired of it in the end!’ Hans had asserted, as if reading her mind.
From one hour to the next, the subtle bond between him and his aunt was growing stronger. It was as if they alone understood, they alone knew or guessed certain things, they alone, of everyone in the house, were grown-ups.
‘What are you doing, Anna?’ Maria said in surprise, seeing Anna come back with a handkerchief knotted around her hair and a bucket of water in each hand.
‘It’s the day for the shop, Mother.’
Another hesitation. Should they go ahead with the usual weekly cleaning of the shop?
They did so. The street door remained open while the scrubbing brush went back and forth on the tiled floor and rivulets of soapy water zigzagged across the doorstep.
Aunt Maria worked with her daughter. Sometimes on the stool, sometimes not, she would pick up all the jars, all the boxes, all the packets of merchandise, shelf by shelf, wipe the woodwork, and every now and again go outside to shake her dust cloth.
Most of the time, Hans watched them, standing between the kitchen and the shop, smoking his cigarette, but sometimes he went to the workshop, an oasis of peace, half-light and coolness. There, nothing was different from any other day, or from how it had been twenty or thirty years earlier. The bundles of wicker, some of white wicker, others of unpeeled wicker, stood against the whitewashed walls. Old Cornelius sat in his corner, on a chair whose legs had been half sawn off, and the assistant occupied a similar chair two metres from him, making a similar basket, at the same speed, neither of them ever thinking of talking.
In all the years, almost a lifetime, that this had been going on, the blue rep cushion on Cornelius’ chair had never been changed!
The door was open, revealing grass between the cobblestones in the yard, and a little free space, an area of black earth, around the lime tree. Birds were singing, and a blackbird hopped in the bright rectangle that constituted the two men’s horizon.
The assistant was a hunchback. He always arrived at six in the morning and left, by the back door, just before nightfall. It was hard to imagine the world in which he spent his time until the next day.
More piano chords! Liesbeth kept on stubbornly, stumbling in the same place and resuming nervously, then racing ahead and stumbling again in an identical manner.
‘Hans!’
Aunt Maria, who had called him, merely said to him in a low voice:
‘Go and have a look outside.’
The pavement was deserted, baking in the sun. He looked right and left and only then at the shop front, where, beneath the window, on the dark brick, big, clumsy downstrokes formed the word ‘Murderers’.
Pipi was nowhere to be seen. The lock was empty. The world seemed asleep and yet, while the two women were in the grocery, the door constantly open, someone had approached, perhaps the little girl from earlier, and written that word.
It was just a word. Sidonie might not have been as dead as she had been but she wasn’t yet being mentioned on the quayside on the edge of town.
It was still abstract.
Murderers, in the plural!
And above the window, the word ‘Krull’.
‘I should wipe it off, shouldn’t I, Hans?’
Even Anna now was stopping in front of him, a wet cloth in her hand, and asking him for advice!
The letters couldn’t be entirely wiped off. Chalk remained in the pores of the brick, and from a distance the word could be reconstructed.
‘Go back in, Hans. Don’t stay there.’
The reason he had lingered for a moment out on the street was to look up at Joseph, still in his shirtsleeves by his window, bent over his exercise books.
All this was as fragile as the air, as the landscape a few moments, a few fractions of a second, before a powder keg explodes.
They were performing the same actions as any other day, but these actions seemed more muffled than usual. When they spoke, they imagined they were speaking naturally, but the voices didn’t have their familiar sound. They washed the floor. Aunt Maria polished the brass pans of the scales, then the zinc part of the counter, where drinks were served.
And all the while they were thinking of their enemies! They didn’t know where they were, or what they were planning.
At five, suddenly, even though the shoe shop didn’t close until 6.30, there was the red hat, and Germaine, this time with other girls, half a dozen street girls like her, whom she must have ga
thered from the dead-end street where she lived.
They were laughing and raising their voices. Germaine was no longer as overawed as she had been at midday. She had the idea of sending one of her friends into the shop, just to see. Before that, they clubbed together to amass a few sous.
The one who came in was a black-haired beanpole, feet bare in old shoes, legs grey with dust.
‘Chocolate!’ she said bad-temperedly, approaching the counter.
‘What kind?’
‘The twenty-sou kind.’
She was looking Aunt Maria in the eyes, muscles tense, clearly ready to run away at the first unsettling gesture.
Aunt Maria put her hand in a jar and fished out a piece of chocolate wrapped in purple paper. The girl pushed her twenty sous across the counter. Was she planning something else, an act of heroism, insulting Maria for example, or throwing the chocolate on the floor? You could see the temptation on her face, but she didn’t dare. She grabbed the purple paper, took two steps normally and finally ran off to join her companions.
One of them, spotting Maria Krull’s forehead and eyes above the window display, stuck her tongue out. But Germaine scorned such childishness. Her role was far too important for that. She was content to stand there and look defiantly in the direction of the shop.
What mysterious association of ideas led Aunt Maria, a few moments later, to ask Hans, who had just poured himself a glass of lemonade:
‘Hasn’t your father written to you, Hans?’
He sensed the suspicion in her voice. They were almost as cunning as each other.
‘It would put him in a compromising position.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m out of favour politically.’
She didn’t insist, announced:
‘I’m going to have a wash.’
The still damp shop smelled clean. Anna, her apron soaked, her hair dishevelled, shook herself and murmured:
‘So am I.’
But it only took a look from her mother for her to realize that it was unwise to leave Hans alone in the shop, and she changed her mind.
‘No, when you come back down! What if someone comes in?’
The words reverberated. They had been involuntary, which made them all the more striking. Since the morning, nobody had come in apart from the girl, who could be seen licking her piece of chocolate on the quayside.
The quayside itself seemed emptier than usual, and in that emptiness all that was left was that stubborn red hat, that disgusting Germaine who, an hour later, was joined by Ninie, tall, her face askew.
What had Ninie been doing all day? Why hadn’t she, too, come to the quayside? And what about Pipi? Or Potut, who had been asleep on a bench earlier and had now disappeared?
The workers from the Rideau boatyard passed at six, as they always did, but this time they stopped. One of them called out to Germaine, who launched into a long speech.
They were in their work clothes. They were looking at the name ‘Krull’. They were becoming bad-tempered.
In the end, though, they left without doing anything. After which, it was the turn of a policeman on a bicycle to stop at the kerb. He didn’t even bother to get off. As the shop door was open, to let the tiles dry, he merely called out:
‘Anyone there?’
Anna went out and he handed her a paper.
‘What is it?’ Hans asked when she came back inside.
‘A summons for Father. He has to present himself at the police station tomorrow at nine o’clock. I think Mother will go instead.’
And indeed, they didn’t show the summons to Cornelius or even tell him about it. They respected him. He was the head of the family. But, perhaps for the very reason that they feared and respected him, he was kept out of most things that happened.
It was striking, all the more so in that he had the calm, the dignity of a deaf person pursuing his inner dreams while everyone about him gets excited.
Whenever he entered the kitchen, everyone fell silent, and he seemed to find this silence natural. They were silent as they ate, apart from a few banal or necessary phrases. They were silent until he left, and the silence accompanied him into the workshop, where he rejoined his assistant.
‘Where’s Liesbeth?’ Aunt Maria asked, slipping the summons inside her blouse.
The piano having fallen silent, they had no idea where Liesbeth was. They called her name up the stairs.
Hans had disappeared, too.
In reality, they had just met up in the corridor on the second floor. Hans had gone up to get cigarettes. Liesbeth had been waiting for him.
She clung to him with an imploring air.
‘I can’t stand it any more!’
Was that his fault? Passionately, she continued:
‘Let’s leave here!’
Her mother’s voice called:
‘Liesbeth!’
‘I’ll be right down!’
However hard she tried to hypnotize Hans, he didn’t give her the gesture of approval she had been expecting.
‘I’m coming!’
She rearranged her hair, mechanically, still turning to him …
‘What were you doing up there?’
‘Nothing! Washing my hands.’
‘Were you with Hans?’
‘No. Why? Isn’t he here?’
Hans was leaning over the banisters, listening and clicking his tongue like a connoisseur.
Was it that Aunt Maria didn’t get to sleep that night? Or was she woken by an unusual noise? Hans became aware in his sleep of whispering outside in the street. Had his aunt heard it, too, and woken completely?
He himself woke up because someone touched his shoulder. It was Liesbeth, in her nightdress, signalling to him to be quiet. Dawn had broken, although it was still indistinct, more grey than pink.
‘Go and have a look downstairs,’ she whispered.
And, as if to better explain what she wanted, she went to the window and cautiously leaned out.
He stood up and put on his pyjamas, which he never wore in bed.
‘What is it?’
She made it clear to him that she didn’t know. He tiptoed downstairs and through the kitchen. The door to the shop was open, and he went in.
Aunt Maria was there, crouching, a cloth in her hand. She looked up in fright, and when she saw it was Hans she put a finger to her mouth.
It was only four in the morning. There wasn’t a soul on the quayside, apart from Aunt Maria, who was cleaning the doorstep.
This was probably the first time in her life that she had shown herself outside in other than her day clothes.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked her with his eyes.
The smell told him. Then the sight, when he was quite close to it. During the night, someone had covered the doorstep with excrement, which his aunt was busy removing.
Hans’ shoulder brushed against something soft. He looked up and saw a dead cat, also smeared in excrement, hanging from the bell.
Aunt Maria carried out her task without disgust, afraid only that she might not have tidied everything up by the time Cornelius came down at 5.30, as he always did.
When she saw Hans take down the cat, she gave him a look of gratitude.
Then, still with gestures, fearing that the slightest noise might wake the house, she pointed to the brown shutter.
On it, in letters more than a metre high, a word had been written, in oil paint this time: ‘Kill’.
7.
Just after 8.30, Maria Krull, who had gone up to her room, came back down, ready to go out, but in her everyday clothes, her woollen dress, her black hat, her linen gloves and her shoes with their turned heels.
There was a mirror in the bamboo coatstand at the foot of the stairs, and, as she always did, she looked in it to adjust her hat.
This time, it was herself and not the hat that she seemed to be looking at. She was quite grey this morning, ash grey, not just her hair, but her complexion, her voice, her movements.
There was a surprised contact between the living eyes and the eyes in the mirror, then Aunt Maria, instead of walking through the kitchen and the shop to go out, went back up to the first floor.
Anna was washing the breakfast dishes, occasionally looking out at the quayside beyond the shop. Liesbeth, because her mother had told her to, had sat down at her piano and was turning the pages of a score while listening to the noises of the house. Hans must have been in the workshop or the yard.
Maria Krull was moving about in her room, and when she came back down again, a few moments later, she had put on the black silk dress she used for special occasions, with the jade jewellery, the gold chain with the clasp, the half-veil and the white gloves.
She didn’t need to look at herself again in the mirror. She was in a hurry. She set off as if nothing was going to stop her but retraced her steps, leaned towards Anna and kissed her on the cheek, without a word, then went into the lounge and kissed Liesbeth twice.
When she came back along the corridor, Hans was there, and she gave a start, hesitated, left at last without having said a word. Or rather, she had murmured to Anna, in her most normal voice:
‘If your father asks for me, say I’ve gone to the market.’
Hans went to the doorway to watch her go. She was hurrying, in spite of herself, looking down at her feet, and Hans could have sworn her lips were moving, that as she walked she was rehearsing in a low voice the words she would say to the inspector …
Was it only an impression caused by Aunt Maria’s absence? There were strange gaps in the house that morning, what aviators call air pockets. You walked across a room and felt uncomfortable because it didn’t have its usual density, because it didn’t smell the same, because you didn’t hear a noise you should have heard. Liesbeth was in the lounge, for instance, sitting at her piano, but even though it was time for her practice, no note emerged from the instrument.
Outside, too, the landscape was emptier today. Were there really fewer boats in the harbour? It was possible, because it was the start of the off-season. There was some washing out to dry, but not much of it, and in the overly still air it hung motionless.
The Krull House Page 9