The Krull House Read online

  Pipi wasn’t at the lock. She had probably drunk too much the day before and was sleeping it off.

  Once the shutter had been raised, the Krull grocery bore no trace of the night’s abuse, and the door was left open as if to assert that nothing had changed and they had no reason to hide.

  At a loose end, Hans came back into the kitchen and, as was his habit, lifted the lids of the saucepans, which was calculated to get Anna in a rage.

  She said nothing. Perhaps she didn’t notice. Everything was muffled, everything was subdued, and the sounds from outside came from further away than usual.

  ‘What are we doing for lunch?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  It wasn’t in order not to answer him. She really had no idea. Hans continued on his way, walked down the always cool corridor and opened the door to the lounge.

  He found the piano closed, Liesbeth with both elbows on the lid, her chin on her hands, staring at a score she didn’t see. He passed behind her and gently stroked the short blonde hair on the back of her neck.

  First, she moved her head to let him know she wanted to be left alone. He persisted, smiling, and she sighed:

  ‘Leave me be, Hans!’

  He kept on stroking her, still smiling, sliding his hand down her back, under her dress and into the hollow between her shoulder blades.

  Then, with an instinctive movement, she turned, genuine anger on her face, and cried:

  ‘Please leave me alone!’

  Her anger had no sooner burst out than she regretted it, looked at Hans anxiously, then turned her head away, murmuring:

  ‘I’m sorry … I’m on edge …’

  He stopped teasing her. Adapting to the tempo of the house, he went and took a chair, sat down astride it next to Liesbeth, in silence, and lit a cigarette. The window, with its net curtain and two green plants in copper pots on either side, was closed, as was the door, and they were alone, surrounded by flowered wallpaper, family photographs, polished furniture and trinkets.

  It was as if Hans knew that Liesbeth was going to speak, wanted to speak. He was waiting, in the pose of someone listening, and she said, as if to get started:

  ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  Then, in a lower voice, turning towards the piano:

  ‘Sometimes I feel ashamed of myself …’

  But he wasn’t ashamed, either of himself or of her. He didn’t even feel sorry for her. But he was savouring the show, the moment, from the atmosphere of the lounge to the line of Liesbeth’s neck, her sharp nose, the little handkerchief rolled into a ball in her hand in preparation for any eventuality.

  ‘Mother has suffered so much! She’s struggled all her life! And all I’ve done was …’

  What he said in reply to this was not at all what she expected. Calmly, blowing cigarette smoke, he asked:

  ‘Why has she suffered?’

  It was the only difficult moment to get through, the hurdle to be cleared. Either she was going to cry, run out and take refuge in her room, or she would talk like a reasonable person. And that was what happened, not all at once, and still with hesitations, with moments of shyness and awkwardness, but with a growing calm.

  ‘People have been so awful to us!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of everything! Because we’re foreigners! At school, the children called me the Kraut, and the teacher would say to me in front of the whole class: “Mademoiselle, when one receives a country’s hospitality, one has double the duty to behave well.” ’

  The door opened, and Anna looked in. Her face as grey as her mother’s, she looked at the couple sitting there calmly and merely sighed:

  ‘So this is where you are, is it?’

  She went out as she had come. The door closed behind her noiselessly. Liesbeth took the opportunity to say:

  ‘Anna was even less lucky. She was almost engaged to a very respectable young man, the son of the justice of the peace who owns the house with the two balconies opposite the church of Saint-Léonard. When his father found out, he sent his son away to continue his studies in Montpellier and swore that he would disown him if he married my sister … What can we do? Mother never hits back. She’s friendly to everyone. But I know it upsets her when neighbours, people like the Morins, who live just next door, prefer to put their hats on and go shopping somewhere else.’

  Her voice grew even lower, in preparation for a more solemn admission.

  ‘Mother is so deserving, Hans! If only you knew …’

  She was going to tell him, of course, but she owed it to herself to hesitate, to look around to make sure that nobody was listening.

  ‘When father arrived here, going from town to town as artisans did in those days, the firing range didn’t exist yet and the parade ground was a vast osier bed. The Rideau boatyard wasn’t here either: I think it was the municipal dump. Father, who didn’t speak French, settled in a wooden shack on the other side of the water, surrounded by osiers, and started making baskets. We used to have a photograph of him at that time, but it faded. He was already like he is now, except that his beard was fair, although in the photograph it looked white …’

  She broke off, pricked up her ears. There was someone in the shop. The two of them listened for a moment, expecting a scene, and were reassured when they recognized the sound of coins in the till, followed by footsteps on the pavement.

  It had been a customer!

  ‘Where the carpenter lives now, there was a little farm where the townspeople came to drink milk on Sundays.’

  ‘And this house?’

  ‘It was only one storey in those days, and where the yard is now was part of the farm’s dung heap. The harbour already existed. Mother says there were more boats than today, all horse-drawn. This was where the bargees came to drink. We didn’t yet have the grocery, but only drinks for the men and oats for the horses.’

  She was at last talking like a reasonable person, and in the oasis of the lounge with its flowered wallpaper, the anguish of the house had melted away. The smoke from Hans’ cigarette wrapped itself around the ceiling light. Sparrows hopped on the window ledge.

  ‘We never talk about these things. Anna knows more about it than I do, because she’s older. She knew our grandmother.’

  ‘Aunt Maria’s mother?’

  ‘Yes. She was the one who ran the bar.’

  ‘All by herself?’

  ‘At first, yes. I never found out where exactly she came from, but she was a southern type. Apparently she was a beautiful woman … Mother was very good-looking, too.’

  ‘And her father?’

  ‘That’s precisely why I said that Mother’s so deserving, Hans … There were a succession of men who lived in the house. Respectable people didn’t speak to my grandmother. All anybody knew about Mother was that she was born at the time when a man from Alsace lived here. He left after two years … Mother served at the bar. That’s how my father met her … Why are you smiling?’

  He wasn’t smiling. His lips might have stretched a tiny bit, but it was not out of irony. He felt no irony where his aunt was concerned.

  He was simply interested … What a long journey it had been! … That bar, with the woman who had come from somewhere else and her daughter … Then Cornelius, a kind of pilgrim who at last put down his bag and moved his tools from the osier field to the back of the shop …

  ‘How long did the three of them live together?’ he asked.

  ‘Several years. Anna remembers Grandmother. I think she was three when the old lady died. She spent all her time in an armchair in the kitchen because her legs had swollen so much that she couldn’t walk any more. Joseph says it was dropsy, and that we still have it in the family …’

  The grandmother had died, and the atmosphere had started to cleanse itself! The zinc on which drinks were served had been relegated to the far end of the counter. Pure blue signs for Remy Starch, with spotless lions on them, had replaced chromos advertising hard liquor, or even more darin
g images, on the windows …

  Aunt Maria was young and beautiful but had probably already acquired that calm, dignified, somewhat rigid demeanour of hers.

  ‘Why didn’t they leave?’

  As he said it, he found his own question ridiculous.

  ‘Why should they?’ Liesbeth replied. ‘Where would they have gone? The house was theirs. They were doing a good trade. When the bargees stop here, they stock up for several days …’

  So of course they had stayed!

  They had stayed for no particular reason, just because they were here!

  Had Cornelius, for instance, had a reason to stop in this place?

  He had travelled through part of Germany, Belgium, northern France. He had reached an osier field between a river and a canal and had settled there, simply, without looking any further, as the Jews had stopped when they reached the Promised Land.

  Did he even think of himself as a foreigner? He had kept his long porcelain pipe, his religion, his customs. He spoke the dialect of his home region, in which French words had gradually become embedded, and his nearest and dearest had had to familiarize themselves with his language.

  ‘Mother’s never said anything, but I know it was hard …’

  Hard to stay? To cling to this stretch of canal, this lock, the few walls of the house?

  Hard to earn money, surely, in the face of people’s hostility! To earn it sou by sou, brick by brick, first to build the upper floors, then to send the children to good schools and dress them respectably, to have a lounge, a piano and shelves filled with honest merchandise!

  It wasn’t quite the town. It was no longer the country. It was the edge of town, and streets were only just starting to appear, pavements born, streetlamps, the tram line …

  Other houses came and surrounded the Krull house. A carpenter set up next door. On the other side, office workers and people with small private incomes built houses, people who probably didn’t know anything about the grandmother.

  All they knew was that the Krulls were foreigners, that they were of no account locally, that they had nothing to do with the neighbourhood but were part of the canal and its itinerant population.

  ‘What about Pipi?’ Hans asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve always known her the way she is now. Even when I was little, she was already creating scenes in the shop … What are you thinking?’

  Without her realizing it, they had become closer. It was one of the rare moments when they were like friends.

  A brief moment, because, as she looked at her cousin, Liesbeth gave a shudder. Her body had remembered and had shivered with shame. Her features clouded over.

  ‘If Mother found out …’ she stammered, bowing her head. ‘Why did I do it, Hans? What’s going to happen now?’

  It didn’t happen immediately. They hadn’t been paying attention, either of them, to the footsteps on the pavement, then in the shop. The door opened. It wasn’t Anna. It was Maria Krull, with her Sunday hat, her silk dress, her jade jewellery, a colourless, expressionless Maria Krull who stood there looking at the two of them.

  They couldn’t have said what she was thinking, nor if she was surprised or displeased to find them there by the piano. She stared at them, her gaze so deep that she must be seeing something else anyway. And yet she asked in her normal voice, although softly:

  ‘Has your father called me?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  Liesbeth was biting her lip. She had stood up and made a move to rush to her mother, but Maria was already withdrawing, closing the door behind her and setting off up the stairs.

  Nothing had happened. Never had an entrance been simpler, or more impressive. Hans frowned, letting the ash drop from his cigarette, unable to respond to his cousin’s interrogative look.

  Was there a new development? What had the police inspector told Aunt Maria? She didn’t have red eyes. She hadn’t been crying. And it was even more disturbing to see her so calm, so cold, to hear her toneless voice and those commonplace words:

  ‘Has your father called me?’

  Was that all that concerned her, then – keeping her visit to the police station from Cornelius?

  Now she was just overhead. They could guess at her every movement as she undressed, put on her weekday dress and tied her cottonette apron with the tiny blue check pattern around her waist.

  ‘Where are you going, Hans?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  He had had enough of the lounge and the mood they had created there, that was all. He felt like going to see Cornelius, who would be sitting on his chair with the sawn-off legs beside the hunchbacked assistant.

  And there he was, his long hands with their prominent veins calmly manipulating the wicker. He raised his head and gave Hans a welcoming look. He had grown accustomed to his nephew coming into the cool workshop from time to time, sometimes sitting down and telling stories about his country.

  Hadn’t he sensed any of his wife’s comings and goings? Hadn’t he suspected anything in the morning, when everything had had to be tidied up before he woke?

  His long face had its perpetual expression. It was a serene expression, accentuated by his white beard, and yet, at the corners of his lips, you sensed something else at odd moments, a kind of resignation or a secret irony.

  ‘It’s hot!’ Hans sighed, impressed by the silence and peace of the workshop.

  Aunt Maria had already gone back to the shop. She was serving the wife of a bargee, a thin redhead carrying a child on her arm, who had to perform a difficult juggling act to get money out of her big purse.

  Then there was another gap, with Anna not daring to say anything and Liesbeth making up her mind, as if in desperation, to do her piano exercises, slowly, harshly, resentfully.

  Outside, there was still no sign of Pipi. As for Joseph, he was making so little noise in his room, it was as if he wasn’t there.

  Several times, Hans felt his aunt’s eyes searching him out, resting on him insistently, but whenever he returned her gaze she would turn away.

  For no apparent reason, she had undertaken to rearrange the hundreds of cans of sardines that filled three shelves, and she set about this chore with exaggerated calm and a determination that recalled Liesbeth’s staunch application to her piano.

  ‘Lunch is served!’ Anna, the only one of the women to show her tiredness, at last announced.

  Cornelius arrived from the workshop, and Joseph from upstairs, in his shirtsleeves, weary-eyed.

  The quayside was still deserted. It was an open question what had happened to their enemies of the day before and what they were preparing.

  Only Germaine, still in her red hat, came to do her usual circuit, like a circus clown. This time, she was accompanied by two girls who were no older than twelve and who were all the more convinced of her importance.

  Germaine was walking in the middle, the two others holding on to her arms, just as she had once held on to Sidonie’s arm, because she was the oldest.

  The three of them formed a compact, hermetic group, whispering terrible secrets and sometimes throwing fearful glances at the Krull house.

  But big-breasted Germaine must have been told off the day before after being late for lunch, because the ceremony didn’t last, and the cluster of girls set off again, solemn as grown-ups, in the direction of Rue Saint-Léonard.

  As for Joseph, he was so pale and weary that it was a pitiful sight, and it was only when he was sure nobody was looking at him that he could bring himself to cast anxious glances at his mother.

  ‘Haven’t you finished your thesis yet?’ Anna asked him, in order to bring the reassuring sound of a human voice into the kitchen at least.

  ‘I still have a few pages to write.’

  ‘When are you presenting it?’

  ‘On the 7th.’

  ‘Let’s hope Monsieur Schoof will have managed to sort things out with the house!’

  That was another story. As soon as he had presented his thesis, Joseph, who had been a
non-resident student at a teaching hospital for the past two years, would set up as a doctor.

  They had in mind a new little house in that part of the quayside already incorporated into the town. This house was to be Marguerite’s dowry: she had chosen it for its spick-and-span appearance and its little garden with a fence around it.

  The wedding and the move were due to take place simultaneously in the autumn, but the current owner of the house was demanding a price that Monsieur Schoof considered excessive, and complicated negotiations had been going on for more than a month now.

  ‘Aren’t you eating any spinach?’

  He shook his head. As for Cornelius, there was a tradition they had never been able to get him to abandon, except when they had company, which was that he used, not one of the knives from the dinner set, but his pocket knife, which he had had for forty years and whose blade was now down to less than a centimetre in width. He would cut his bread on his thumb, bend down and hold his beard with his left hand as he lifted the food to his mouth.

  ‘Do you have a lesson this afternoon, Liesbeth?’ Maria Krull asked.

  ‘Yes, at two. A harmony class.’

  A plane flew over the neighbourhood, so loudly and so low that you wondered if it was going to knock down a chimney pot or damage a roof, as the newspapers sometimes reported. Joseph was the first to rise from the table and go upstairs.

  They still didn’t know what had happened in the police inspector’s office. Aunt Maria, as she did every day, first helped Anna to wash the dishes.

  Was she deliberately delaying the moment? Was she preparing herself, summoning up her strength, practising to maintain the inhuman calm she had been displaying since the morning?

  In addition, there was Hans, who didn’t know what to do with himself and was always there whenever the others were about to relax.

  Didn’t Aunt Maria even once throw him an imploring look as she carried out some kind of inspection of the shop?

  She tidied, touched this or that thing, opened and closed the till.

  At last, she seemed to take a deep breath. Through the half-open door to the kitchen, she announced to Anna:

  ‘I’ll be right down!’