The Krull House Read online

  Joseph folded his big body in two. His feet touched the floor. For a moment, he sat there on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Are you happy now?’

  With the best will in the world, Hans couldn’t have explained why there was still that faint glimmer of gaiety on his face, like a reflection of the morning, the pale sky, the clear air stretching to infinity beyond the window, full of sounds and life.

  He had just seen Joseph asleep. Now he saw him barely awake, timid and sly. He couldn’t help saying to him:

  ‘Idiot!’

  He couldn’t take his eyes off his cousin. It was a prodigious spectacle, watching Joseph get up, worried, jealous, bitter, and understanding everything that was happening inside him, the slightest movements, even those that Joseph himself was unaware of!

  That was the extraordinary thing: Hans could have been Joseph! He was capable of being both Joseph and Hans! He could have played both parts himself, said both men’s lines in the dialogue that was about to start.

  While Joseph was only Joseph!

  He was standing, his head higher than the light hanging over the table. His face was still shiny from the sweat of sleep, and the back of his shirt was crumpled.

  ‘I’ve just had a long conversation with Aunt Maria,’ Hans began, standing up and going to the window.

  He sat down on the sill and lit a cigarette.

  ‘What did my mother tell you?’

  ‘Everything! She’d like me to leave here so that people will suspect me. She reckons that way the family will be left alone. How stupid is that?’

  Joseph, head bowed, said in a muffled voice:

  ‘They have no right to bother us! I didn’t do anything.’

  If he had been less tall, the sight would have been less pitiful. But he was huge, and his head, when he lowered it that way, seemed to hang at the end of his long neck.

  Until now, in his relations with Hans, what had dominated was hatred and suspicion. The hatred of someone who feels inferior and can’t stand feeling it, who considers that inferiority to be an injustice but is unable to react against it.

  A hatred based on unwilling admiration, on envy!

  And now, today, faced with a Hans who knew everything and was dominating him with his Olympian smile, he was reduced to stammering:

  ‘I didn’t do anything …’

  ‘That’s the most ridiculous part of it!’

  Hans couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. Looking outside, he saw Pipi move away from the group and start towards the house.

  Joseph was struggling with himself, struggling to overcome his timidity, his meekness, his jealous admiration for his cousin’s nonchalant, cynical attitude.

  ‘Since I didn’t kill that girl …’

  ‘You’re the one they suspect and will continue to suspect.’

  There was a new familiarity in the way he addressed Joseph. He wasn’t being contemptuous, or superior. They had suddenly got closer.

  ‘Because I’m a foreigner!’ Joseph retorted. ‘It’s always the same! Every time something happens in the neighbourhood, they blame us.’

  Hans was both inside and outside. He was following Pipi with his eyes and imagining Aunt Maria’s forehead and grey hair as she watched the enemy over the window display.

  But he still kept his eyes on Joseph as he gradually freed himself from the slackness of sleep.

  ‘It’s not because you’re foreigners,’ he said in the tone of a man who knows the truth and is unassailed by doubt. ‘It’s because you’re not foreign enough! Or else because you’re too foreign.’

  They heard the bell ring in the shop. Liesbeth and Anna were probably in the kitchen, looking through the tulle curtain. The policeman moved closer to the window.

  ‘We’re not foreign enough?’ Joseph echoed with a frown.

  ‘Or too much! You’re not honest about being foreign. You’re shamefaced foreigners. Just as you’re shamefaced Protestants. You come and settle among people and try to be like them. You imitate them clumsily, knowing you’ll never be them. And they sense it. I bet you put out more flags than anyone else on the 14th of July, I bet you scatter rose petals in the street on Corpus Christi. People resent you for it more than if you did nothing at all, than if you quite boldly closed your shutters.’

  He was silent for a moment. He could hear nothing. It pained him to be missing part of the show, not knowing what was going on between his aunt and Pipi.

  ‘If we were aggressive, it’d be even worse!’ Joseph objected.

  He was almost cowed. As long as this wasn’t just about him, he could regain his composure and reflect on the ideas put forward by Hans.

  ‘It’s not about being aggressive, but about being sure of yourself! Like the Jews when they settle somewhere … They aren’t ashamed of their names, or their noses. Nor are they ashamed of their business sense, their love of money. That’s the way it is and no other way! Never mind what other people think! They keep themselves to themselves and don’t care if children in the street make faces at them.’

  He gave a start. The bell had just rung again. The policeman could no longer be seen outside in the street. He had come into the shop. The door was still open. They heard him say with feigned severity:

  ‘That’s enough now. Don’t stay here!’

  ‘She started it!’ Pipi squealed. ‘She dared to bring up the baby clothes she gave me when my poor daughter was born. They were all worn, she’d already used them for her three children.’

  ‘Come on, just leave! I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘So I’m the one causing trouble now, am I?’

  The policeman took her away, and she continued arguing all down the street. Hans looked at his cousin.

  ‘You see!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Always the same thing! Your mother whined about her good deeds! She’s good enough to give, but not enough to forget it. You people are too much and not enough.’

  The most extraordinary thing was that he was unwittingly being recognized as having the right to judge them! Joseph was listening to him! Joseph, who the previous day had wanted to throw him out, was having a debate with him!

  True, he sneered:

  ‘In other words, we should be completely dishonest!’

  ‘That’s best! Or completely honest. But don’t lurk on the quayside at night, creeping about, watching couples kissing in the hope of glimpsing a bit of skin …’

  Joseph turned his head away and cracked his long fingers. He hesitated, and finally said:

  ‘And what about my sister?’

  ‘Liesbeth?’ Hans said innocently.

  ‘Yes, Liesbeth.’

  He was again overcome with emotion, the same dubious, unhealthy emotion that made his hands shake whenever certain subjects came up.

  ‘Liesbeth is perfectly happy!’ Hans asserted.

  ‘Now maybe, but what about later?’

  ‘She’ll probably get married one day, and it won’t matter any more.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Married and all the rest.’

  ‘And what if her husband finds out?’

  Hans shrugged, threw his cigarette into the street, lit another and watched as the policeman returned on his own after getting rid of Pipi.

  It must have been about eleven in the morning. The hammers from the Rideau boatyard were beating at a rapid pace, and the trams were stopping every three minutes.

  Joseph didn’t know what else to say, or what attitude to adopt. Nor did he know what to make of his cousin, whom he kept looking at surreptitiously and whose self-confidence he so admired.

  He was heavy-hearted. If he could, he would have wept, not only with sadness but with disgust at himself and everything, people, life, what he had done and what he would have liked to do, disgust at being, as Hans had said, too much or not enough …

  There was a terrible, depressing injustice about it: always, as far back as he could remember, he had wanted to do the right thing, he had alway
s made an effort to be like everyone else, better than everyone else, to be the best student at school, a well-behaved, respectful child at home, to keep his clothes clean, to overcome his worst instincts …

  And now here he was, in the position of an accused man, while this Hans, who was the same age as him, looked at him with a mocking eye, outshone him with all his calm cynicism.

  He felt like bait at the end of a line. It seemed to him that Hans was following his thoughts step by step, ready to reel him in just when he wanted.

  He couldn’t hate him any more. He could only be subject to him. He was almost at the point where he might ask him for advice!

  ‘Why did you tell your mother all that?’ Hans asked, looking around the room as if reconstructing the previous day’s scene.

  ‘The inspector had told her …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything!’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘All about these girls I sometimes followed at night. I was never capable of accosting them. I didn’t know what to say to them. I was afraid they’d burst out laughing as soon as I opened my mouth.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘What do you mean, now?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Hans looked his cousin straight in the eyes. It wasn’t that he was sorry for him, but he understood, he was thinking, making an effort to play both roles, to feel like Joseph, to anticipate his reactions.

  ‘When the inspector questions me, I’ll tell him the truth!’

  ‘Then you’re done for!’

  He had used the German word: kaputt!

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they won’t believe you.’

  Hans had no desire to see this conversation come to an end. He felt fine, sitting there on his window-sill, a ray of sunshine on his back.

  And Joseph, for his part, would have been disorientated if his cousin had suddenly left him to his own devices. In the past few minutes, ever since Hans had entered the room, something had changed. Joseph was no longer alone with his shame, his remorse, his rage, his indignation, with all these thoughts and feelings that had been eating away at him for several days.

  What was soothing was that, with Hans, words took on a different, almost ethereal meaning, facts were no longer so blunt, even ceased to matter. At a push, they could have talked calmly about Sidonie and the way the drama had unfolded!

  ‘They won’t believe you because it isn’t plausible. People think a young man should have girlfriends and not be content with just watching. When you watched me with your sister through the keyhole …’

  Joseph dared to raise his eyes, waiting for the question.

  ‘I bet you weren’t all that angry, were you?’

  Hans was being benevolent. It was he who decided if things were good or bad, shameful or not. He juggled with them, just as he juggled with his cigarette, moving it from one corner of his lips to the other, so that it constantly looked as if it was going to fall.

  ‘To be honest, you’re a little bit disgusting … Your mother, too, when it comes down to it, because she knows I slept with her daughter and yet she’s asking me to do her a service.’

  Joseph didn’t object. There was no way out now. Having accepted certain phrases, certain judgements, he was forced to endure the rest.

  ‘You’re all weird people, believe me, and if I were one of the locals I wouldn’t look kindly on you either. Aunt Maria lectures Pipi but serves her drinks. I mean, if there wasn’t anyone to serve her alcohol, Pipi wouldn’t be able to get drunk!’

  What must they be thinking downstairs? Just like the day before, when Aunt Maria was in this same room with Joseph, Liesbeth and Anna were probably looking up at the ceiling from time to time, wondering what drama was being played out up here.

  But there wasn’t any drama at all. There was just a plain young man’s bedroom. There was Joseph walking up and down, bending his head each time in order to avoid knocking the light, stopping every now and again to face his cousin.

  And Hans talking …

  Yes, he was still talking, in a low voice, letting the words flow as they came to him, as Joseph inspired them.

  ‘Are you going to marry Marguerite?’

  Oh, yes! Marguerite and the little house Monsieur Schoof would buy them!

  A smart, shiny cage from which Joseph would look out at everything he desired!

  And he desired everything!

  Just like Hans.

  But if Hans desired something, he took it! He had even desired to live in a house like this one, for as long as he could, to sniff its good smells, scandalize Anna, frighten Aunt Maria, push Joseph over the edge, make love with Liesbeth and teach her the most obscene practices.

  He had desired it and he had done it!

  And when he desired to go somewhere else …

  ‘You see, Joseph, in my opinion you’ll always be unhappy.’

  Joseph blew up. ‘Because I’m not like the others! Because I’m a foreigner everywhere! Because I feel different! Because I don’t have a country, don’t have compatriots, don’t have people who think the way I do! Because I was born in a kind of island, and my family are incapable of understanding me. Could I tell my father …?’

  Hans smiled. The idea of telling old Cornelius these stories about girls was amusing.

  Joseph was amusing, too, with his monumental good faith, his obsessive sense that he was a kind of pariah, his hunger to conform, his need to fit into a given order, to feel part of the crowd and be approved by it.

  ‘Ever since kindergarten I’ve stood out.’

  ‘In my case, it’s deliberate!’ Hans asserted.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Trying to be different from the others! That’s why people respect me. If I’d come and asked you all nicely to take me in, admitting that I didn’t have a cent and didn’t know what to do … Or if I’d told Liesbeth she was pretty and I was in love with her instead of just throwing her on the bed …’

  He had turned.

  ‘Ah, there’s the other one!’ he observed.

  The ‘other one’ was Germaine, still in her awful red hat. Someone else who took herself seriously, who thought her time had come! Barely had she left her shoe shop than she press-ganged one friend or another and came here to keep an eye on the Krulls!

  Because in a way they belonged to her. It was thanks to her testimony that an investigation into them had been started. She savoured her own importance, rolling her big buttocks like an older woman, roaring with laughter like a whore, walking up and down in front of the house, whispering God knows what in her companions’ ears.

  Sidonie was dead, and she had inherited not only her place but the duty to avenge her! She had also inherited young friends with spindly legs who clung to her arms and to whom she imparted more or less accurate information about men and love.

  ‘I bet you would have been capable of following her, too, just like Sidonie,’ Hans said, still on the window-sill. ‘What this one needs is a good spanking. I might decide to give her one myself!’

  He burst out laughing, seeing the face his cousin made at this prospect.

  ‘No, Joseph, don’t get so excited as soon as I mention a woman’s behind!’

  More than ever, Joseph was on the verge of crying. His hands had shaken. He had turned red. He was in a state of confusion. He wanted to beg Hans to leave right now but might just as easily have held him back.

  He was afraid of him and he needed him. Since the two of them had been in this room, since the words they had exchanged had begun to disperse the fog, to make the anguish fade, to make complicated ideas disarmingly simple, he had been dreading solitude.

  He wasn’t defeated, though. He kept looking at his cousin, searching for arguments against him, forcing himself to hate him in spite of everything.

  They had both forgotten the three women downstairs, as well as Cornelius in his workshop with the assistant.

  The room had almost become a real student’s roo
m. Hans threw his cigarette end on the floor and shrugged, his eyes still on Germaine out there.

  ‘Once people start taking themselves seriously …’ he began.

  He broke off, saw Joseph expecting him to continue.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t think it’s worth it …’

  It was he, Hans, who had hesitated and was now staring at a point on the floor.

  Once people start taking themselves seriously … What then? Why was it his turn to feel queasy? Why had he mentioned the little house that Monsieur Schoof intended for Joseph and Marguerite?

  ‘But there are things we’re obliged to take seriously all the same!’ Joseph sighed. ‘Having an affected lung, for instance …’

  They pricked up their ears. They had just heard, or rather sensed, the rustle of a skirt on the stairs. There was someone behind the door. The handle was turning.

  ‘So this is where you are?’ Aunt Maria said, looking first at one then at the other.

  She found it hard to conceal her surprise – or was it anxiety? She probably hadn’t expected to find such an atmosphere in her son’s room.

  Hans had both feet up on the window-sill, presenting his profile. Joseph had his elbows on the mantelpiece, near the clock that still showed ten to twelve.

  And both were solemn, with a solemnity that had nothing tragic about it, the solemnity of young men calmly setting the world to rights.

  Indeed, Joseph looked at his mother in surprise, as if noticing certain things for the first time.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. I just came to see if the two of you were ready for lunch. It’s half past twelve.’

  She would have liked to know. She looked from one to the other. She couldn’t get much from her son’s face. Joseph was stubbornly inscrutable, although much calmer than usual.

  She fell back on Hans, as if he were her accomplice, and waited for a gesture from him, some sign that would reassure her.

  Hans was looking outside, refusing to answer her appeal.

  ‘Will you come down now?’

  ‘We’re coming,’ Joseph said.

  His mother glanced at the bed. She asked again, in surprise: