The Krull House Read online

‘Were you sleeping?’

  ‘I had a little rest.’

  She really had the impression she was an intruder. She retreated.

  ‘Come down,’ she repeated.

  They let her go, listening to her steps diminish on the stairs. Joseph tried to meet his cousin’s eyes.

  ‘We really have to do something,’ he said in a hesitant voice.

  He, too, was waiting for an answer, but obtained only an evasive gesture. Before going down, Hans went over to the exercise book, still open at the same page, and pointed at the words written in the margin:

  It might be enough to …

  He gave a gentle smile that was almost entirely devoid of irony.

  They went downstairs, one behind the other.

  And when they took their places at the table, the three women looked at them with a degree of anxiety, as if sensing that there was a new bond between them that excluded the rest of the household, that perhaps united them against it.

  Cornelius was already eating, holding his beard with his left hand.

  10.

  It was the first time in quite a while that there had been such a sense of familiarity and routine in the kitchen. Joseph was eating quite naturally and, after not daring to look at the others for several days, now threw curious glances at Anna, Liesbeth and his father, as if he had been away.

  Today, there was sauerkraut, which was pure chance, because they rarely made it, and it would play a role in what was to happen.

  Aunt Maria and Anna had begun a conversation about the dress the latter wanted to make herself.

  ‘Two metres sixty in width should be enough.’

  ‘I’ll need twice that in length, Mother. And if I want to make the skirt a bit wider …’

  The samples were on the table between the two women, small pieces of bright fabric. Liesbeth had fingered them for a long time, holding them up to the light.

  She was barely thinking about what Joseph and Hans might have been discussing for so long.

  Just then, the shop door opened, and the bell rang. Aunt Maria looked up, as did Hans, who was again on the same side of the table as her.

  As soon as they had peered through the curtain, they exchanged glances. The others noticed and now also looked.

  Anna was already pushing back her chair, but Aunt Maria announced:

  ‘I’ll go!’

  Of the two men who had come in, one was the police inspector. Today, he was wearing a boater and a silky alpaca jacket. Short and fat, he was the perfect image of the petit bourgeois who strolls along the riverbanks watching the anglers fishing.

  His companion was the same physical type, although less plump and more surly, perhaps because he suffered with his stomach and liver.

  Both men were at their ease. When Maria Krull entered, the inspector had just uncorked a bottle he had taken from the counter and was sniffing it. Simply out of curiosity! He gave the impression that he had told his companion:

  ‘You’ll see what a strange shop it is and what strange people they are!’

  It was as if he were in a foreign country, finding everything extraordinary, even the banality of it.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Madame Krull. This gentleman is the chief inspector from headquarters. He’s been put in charge of the investigation into the case you’re familiar with. As he has a few questions to ask your son …’

  Through the curtain, they could see the family frozen around the table.

  ‘So it’s my son you want to speak to?’ Aunt Maria said suspiciously.

  The two men signalled to each other. The chief inspector, the one with stomach problems, took a paper from his pocket and handed it to Madame Krull without a word.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Read it!’

  ‘I don’t have my glasses.’

  ‘It’s a search warrant.’

  ‘What do you want to search?’

  ‘Your son’s room, to start with.’

  It took her a second to recover. Then she made up her mind and rushed to the door opening on to the corridor.

  ‘Come this way, gentlemen. I’ll tell my son. Please, go into the lounge.’

  A lounge that was nothing out of the ordinary. Wallpaper with little flowers, shelves with trinkets, some in spun glass, an embroidered table runner, a piano …

  And yet the two inspectors kept sniffing as if they had discovered an unknown country and, because of the sauerkraut, the man with the bad stomach declared:

  ‘It stinks of Krauts here!’

  The first person Aunt Maria looked at when she came back into the kitchen wasn’t Joseph, it was Cornelius. But Cornelius, as if he hadn’t heard anything, wiped his mouth, calmly stood up, walked over to the rack and took down his long porcelain pipe.

  ‘It’s someone for you, Joseph. I showed them into the lounge. Maybe you should put on a jacket …’

  Joseph got to his feet, much more calmly than might have been expected, and briefly glanced around the family table, as if to fix a complete living image of it in his mind.

  They saw him disappear into the lounge but couldn’t say anything because Cornelius was still in the kitchen.

  They had to wait. Normally, it would be ten or twelve minutes before he went back to his workshop. Did he realize that he was in the way? He didn’t say anything. Stepping softly, his pipe between his teeth, he preferred to walk out into the yard.

  The door to the lounge was already opening. Joseph was saying:

  ‘This way. I’ll lead you.’

  There was the clatter made by the three men on the stairs, then on the first floor.

  Liesbeth was trying in vain to catch Hans’ eye to ask him what was happening. Anna, resigned, had started washing the dishes. Aunt Maria had disappeared.

  Hans lingered long enough to light a cigarette then left in his turn, climbed the stairs four steps at a time and opened a door he had never opened before, the door to his uncle’s and aunt’s room.

  He knew that it communicated with Joseph’s room. He hadn’t taken two steps before he saw Aunt Maria standing against the communicating door, her finger to her lips.

  Taking care that the floorboards didn’t creak, he moved over to that door, and she left him a little space beside her, their faces almost touching.

  ‘… the clothes you were wearing on the 17th …’

  Joseph replied, opening the mirrored wardrobe:

  ‘These are the only ones I have …’

  Two grey suits, the same steel-grey, too big for him, giving him that long, slack figure, that irresolute demeanour.

  ‘What day do you do the laundry in this house?’

  They recognized the voice of the chief inspector, while the other inspector, the plump one, had sat down on the window-sill, his back to the quayside, in the same pose as Hans that morning.

  ‘Monday,’ Joseph replied.

  It was startling to hear how normal his voice was, even though he was alone with two police officers.

  ‘Obviously,’ one of them muttered, having fingered the grey suits thoroughly.

  Which meant there was nothing, that he had expected to find nothing.

  Between Hans’ nose and his aunt’s there wasn’t even a gap of ten centimetres. Around them was a room that Hans didn’t yet know, the most solid, most permanent in the house, a room in which the smallest object had taken months or years to find its place.

  It was in this room that Joseph had been born. It was the same then as it was now! And all his childhood, all his adolescence, he had seen nothing but motionless, eternal things, furniture that had existed for so long that it had lost all sense of men’s work, or of material sawn or planed, furniture that was the bed, the wardrobe, the sideboard, the armchair where father sat …

  ‘I still have a few questions to ask you … Sit down if you like.’

  Hans imagined the man taking a little piece of paper from his pocket, and he wasn’t wrong. The chief inspector had k
ept his soft hat on his head. It was the time of day he dreaded, immediately after lunch, and every now and again he grimaced in pain.

  ‘Do you know a man named Cloasquin?’

  They were leaving the sphere of what Hans knew, but he saw his aunt grow pale at the name and restrain an angry impulse.

  Wasn’t the name itself like a kind of threat? Cloasquin! Émile Cloasquin!

  Joseph’s hands had shaken. ‘I knew him at school,’ he replied.

  ‘The school you were expelled from, I think?’

  And the chief inspector, after looking at his piece of dirty paper, went on:

  ‘You hated Cloasquin, whose parents had a grocery on Place Saint-Léonard. He was smaller and weaker than you. You stalked him for weeks and one evening, as he passed a patch of waste ground, you threw yourself at him, knocked him down, pinned him to the ground with your knee on his chest and put your hands round his throat.’

  ‘I was eleven years old!’ Joseph said, and they were surprised to hear his voice.

  ‘After that incident, Cloasquin developed jaundice and was confined to his bed for a month, which put his schoolwork back by a year.’

  A strange, puny boy, with very fair hair, a mouth that was too big and very small eyes.

  ‘He used to stir all the others up against me, calling me a Kraut …’

  It was true. The sickly Cloasquin, sure of having all his classmates with him, had taken it out on Joseph, who was nearly a head taller than any of them. Every break time, he would taunt him.

  For months, Joseph had suffered patiently, then, as the chief inspector had just said, he had stalked his enemy, laid him low and squeezed his throat, repeating:

  ‘Say sorry! I want you to say sorry and promise to leave me alone.’

  ‘I note just one thing,’ the man with the bad stomach recited calmly. ‘That you grabbed him by the throat and he fainted. You were eleven, Monsieur Krull!’

  A silence. Hans could see Aunt Maria’s eye very close to his, the skin of her cheek, every pore of it, as if through a magnifying glass.

  ‘Another thing …’

  The piece of paper was again called to the rescue.

  ‘Do you know a woman called Marcotte?’

  No reply. Had Joseph flinched? This time, Aunt Maria didn’t understand, and waited curiously for what would come next.

  ‘You don’t deny it, then? You know the woman, you know she solicits on the corner of Rue des Carmes every night. You’ve approached her on several occasions – quite regularly, in fact, unless I’m mistaken.’

  The remarkable thing was that Joseph was much calmer, much more at ease with these two aggressive men than with his mother or even with Hans. He was watching his enemy, the man in the soft hat, in no hurry to answer, waiting to hear the accusations.

  ‘Marcotte has stated that you didn’t ask for quite the same thing as the others. Usually, she takes her clients to her place in Impasse des Forgerons. But you always refused to go with her. You insisted on doing it outside, in a dark corner. And this was on every occasion! … Shall I read you her statement?’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘You admit it?’

  A nod. Joseph was still standing. He wasn’t defying them. He wasn’t blushing either. He just seemed to be thinking, trying to guess where they were going with this.

  ‘Next! Do you know Jeanne Aubray?’

  He made an effort and finally murmured:

  ‘I don’t recognize the name.’

  ‘She’s the maid at the Rideaus’.’

  A gorgeous girl, who always went around with the top of her blouse open and turned all the men’s heads.

  ‘Three times a week, Jeanne Aubray sees her boyfriend on the quayside, not far from her employers’ house. Is it correct that every time they met you hid in a corner to watch, and the boyfriend, who was a stonemason, had to chase you away and threaten to give you a thrashing if you continued to snoop on them?’

  No reply. Joseph was tacitly admitting it. Hans could still see Aunt Maria’s motionless eye.

  ‘That’s not all. Let’s get to Sidonie … Her friend Germaine was with her when you first approached her. It was a rainy evening. You’d been following the two girls for a long time. They laughed, knowing you were behind them. They did an abrupt about-turn, and you were thrown for a moment and lost your composure. Then you showed them a fifty-franc note you had in your hand … Is that correct?’

  No reply. The other inspector was smoking his pipe and examining the young man with his large, amused eyes.

  ‘This wasn’t the only time you did this with young girls. You always showed them money.’

  Joseph sounded distant but clear, although glum.

  ‘Because I didn’t dare talk to them!’

  ‘In other words, you didn’t want to flirt with them like other young men, you just wanted to get straight down to business … To sum up, once night fell, you’d wander around the quayside, looking for couples, and when you saw one you’d crouch in the shadows and watch. After which, if a girl passed, you’d loom up in front of her, not quite sure what to say, looking like a madman, as one of them put it, and if she gave you time, you’d offer her money. If that didn’t work, you’d go off and find the Marcotte woman … How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed to have such vices at your age?’

  ‘I’ve always been alone …’ Joseph stammered, as if talking to himself.

  He didn’t lower his eyes but looked the chief inspector full in the face, solemnly.

  And to the surprise of both his mother and Hans, he went on, in that toneless voice he had begun to adopt:

  ‘When I was small and occupied this same room, the house on the right hadn’t been built yet. There was a patch of waste ground and, right up against the wall of our house, a grass embankment hidden, on the street side, by a stretch of fence. That was where couples came almost every night … There was a woman rather like Marcotte who’d go looking for bargees and bring them here. From my window, I’d watch …’

  ‘Is that a reason to imitate them all your life?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe if people hadn’t made fun of me … But I haven’t done anything reprehensible.’

  ‘On the evening of the 17th, you were at the fair, weren’t you?’

  ‘I dropped by.’

  ‘You followed Sidonie and her friend.’

  ‘I noticed them from a distance.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘Nothing. I went for a walk.’

  Aunt Maria put her hand on Hans’ arm and squeezed it.

  ‘What time did you get home?’

  ‘About eleven. I didn’t check the time, but I’d definitely got back by eleven.’

  ‘In that case, let me read you a statement by your neighbour Madame Guérin, the carpenter’s wife …’

  Aunt Maria stiffened and for a moment it looked as if she might open the door and rush into the next room to defend her son.

  ‘ “… I had my neuralgia. I get it every two weeks or so. I’m sure of the date because it was the day my sister, who lives in Tilly, visited me. At half past ten, as I couldn’t get to sleep, I took a pill and went and sat by the window. I went back to bed half an hour later. There’s an alarm clock on the bedside table that lights up, so I could see what time it was. The pain was still there. At ten past eleven, I took another pill and went back to the window. From where I was, it was too dark to see the canal bank, and there wasn’t any moon that night. The Krulls’ cousin was the first to return home. He came along the street from the direction of town. It wasn’t until well after midnight, when I was just about to go back to bed, that I saw Joseph Krull return home. He was coming from the direction of the canal …” ’

  A more troubling silence, Aunt Maria’s hand tensing on Hans’ arm.

  ‘Do you still say you got back at eleven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you make a statement to that effect on oa
th?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then immediately, in the same voice:

  ‘No!’

  The hand let go, and for a moment Aunt Maria left her listening post, because her legs had given out.

  ‘I might as well tell you the truth. I followed Sidonie and her friend. Who knows, maybe I’d have tried again? At moments like these, you always hope—’

  ‘That the fifty-franc note will do the trick!’ the chief inspector cut in crudely.

  ‘That the miracle will happen. That everything you’ve imagined while walking around for hours will come true.’

  He wasn’t ashamed, he was merely correcting the chief inspector. He knew these things better than the others, and he was telling it like it was.

  ‘I think it happens to everyone. You see a woman pass in the street and you feel a sudden desire for her, you imagine that that desire can be realized, you conjure up every little detail—’

  ‘Except that it doesn’t happen to normal men with every woman who passes!’

  ‘That’s right,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps because most men have other distractions. Not me.’

  No, it was too difficult to explain! Especially as the two inspectors saw things differently from him, with all the exaggerated harshness of a police report.

  ‘That evening, a man approached Sidonie.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ the man with the bad stomach asked ironically.

  ‘I didn’t see him very well. Quite tall, quite sturdy. Badly dressed, I think. I followed them …’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. Go on.’

  ‘I didn’t immediately realize what was happening. I saw Sidonie struggling, but I didn’t think it was serious. It was only afterwards …’

  ‘How far away were you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Twenty metres maybe?’

  ‘And you saw the man dragging the body to the canal?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And you didn’t intervene?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘And it didn’t occur to you to inform the police? You just went calmly to bed?’

  ‘Not calmly!’

  ‘And the next day, you didn’t tell anybody, not even your cousin?’

  He shook his head. In all honesty, he had rarely been so calm. His body felt freer, as if it had been purged. Free and slightly empty, slightly floating …