The Krull House Read online

  Hans didn’t wonder for very long what he had to do. It was automatic. He simply winked and went back into his room, where he looked out of the window at a passing train, the green mass of the trees, light shimmering on the water between the trunks, and sniffed a little at the lingering smell of Liesbeth on his body.

  At lunch, Joseph didn’t say anything. He was just as boring as usual, just as imbued with the solemn nature of life.

  Old Cornelius, who alone was entitled to a wicker armchair, never spoke. Hans had already wondered if it was because he was stupid.

  It was Anna who dealt with Hans.

  ‘What do you call this?’ she asked, pointing to the dish.

  ‘Carrots.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘Meat!’

  ‘Mutton chops. Repeat. Mutton …’

  He would have liked to laugh and nudge Liesbeth, who was sitting next to him, with his elbow, even – why not? – ask her out loud:

  ‘What do you call what we did earlier?’

  He held back, keeping it all to himself. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t smiling, but his whole being exuded cheerfulness.

  ‘Aren’t you eating, Liesbeth?’ Aunt Maria scolded.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  He nevertheless amused himself by decreeing in a tone that would have suited the solemn Joseph:

  ‘Young people your age should always be hungry!’

  She threw him a sad glance. Seeing that her eyes had misted over, he gave her knee a joyful squeeze.

  ‘Isn’t that so, Joseph? You, being a doctor …’

  There was no way the others could understand. They thought it was an ordinary day, filled with peace and sunshine. They had no idea that it had taken only a few minutes to …

  Suddenly, Liesbeth stood up, her face buried in her table napkin, and walked out. They could hear her sobbing hoarsely.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  Joseph was looking his cousin in the eyes, Old Cornelius was chewing slowly, not thinking of anything else, while in the workshop, his assistant was gnawing at the packed lunch he brought every morning …

  ‘How about going for a little walk, cousin?’

  ‘Call him Joseph, Hans!’ Aunt Maria cut in.

  It was evening. The family were all sitting out on the pavement, their backs to the house, the uncle in his wicker armchair, the others on straw-bottomed chairs.

  The sun had only just set. Moist, cool air rose from the canal, and thin strands of fog were starting to form between the trees.

  Twenty metres further along the street, outside the carpenter’s doorway, there were other chairs, other people, but these people had nothing to do with the Krulls and weren’t looking their way.

  Cornelius was smoking a long porcelain pipe, his eyes half-closed, his beard as stiff as that of a carved saint. Aunt Maria was sewing red cotton on the corners of a pile of check table napkins. Anna had brought out a book but wasn’t reading it, and Liesbeth, claiming she wasn’t feeling well, had gone to bed.

  The world was almost empty. The barges were asleep. A thin jet of water filtered through a lock gate that hadn’t been properly closed, making a sound like a fountain, interspersed every ten minutes by the din of the tram, although this grew less frequent as darkness wore on.

  ‘Good idea. Go for a little walk. But don’t come back too late.’

  Hans never wore a hat, which accentuated his casual demeanour. He wore soft shirts with open collars, and his clothes had a particular looseness that underlined Joseph’s stiffness.

  Why did little circles endlessly appear on the smooth surface of the canal, as if bearing witness to an inner life?

  The two young men strode slowly along.

  They weren’t just the same age, but the same height, and they both had long legs and large feet.

  ‘You’re not saying anything, Cousin Joseph!’

  Turning, they could see the family, motionless on the threshold of the house, and the other family, the carpenter’s, grouped a little further along the pavement. On one of the barges, washing was drying on lines.

  ‘I’m wondering what you’re planning to do with my sister.’

  ‘I’m not planning to do anything!’

  The edge of the town was behind them, and what lay ahead was already the country, or rather an in-between zone, with hedges, nettles and patches of waste ground, but no meadows or cows yet.

  ‘Were you looking through the keyhole?’ Hans asked casually.

  He didn’t turn to look at his cousin. It wasn’t necessary to do so to know that Joseph was blushing.

  ‘If you were, you must have noticed that she wanted it as much as I did.’

  What he saw was Joseph’s hand, a long hand, paler in the twilight, a strangely shaped hand that suddenly started shaking.

  ‘Why did you come to our house?’ Joseph asked in a hesitant voice.

  ‘Because I didn’t know where to go!’

  ‘Why not somewhere else?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. My father had just one brother and one sister. The sister’s in a convent in Lübeck. I could hardly go there.’

  And in a lighter tone:

  ‘Did you do any work today?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Because of that?’

  ‘Because of everything.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning everything!’

  His hands were still shaking. He had stopped less than twenty metres from a streetlamp, the last one before the definitive darkness of the countryside. Following the direction of his gaze, Hans made out a vague mass, a couple standing in the shadows, a man and a woman embracing, the woman up on tiptoe the better to glue her lips to her companion’s.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, without attaching any importance to the question.

  ‘Sidonie.’

  ‘Who’s Sidonie?’

  ‘Pipi’s daughter … It doesn’t matter …’

  ‘Tell me, Joseph!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Aren’t you all a little bit … a little bit strange in your family?’

  It wasn’t the right word. He had hesitated. If he had known the word ‘eccentric’, he would doubtless have chosen that.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘No reason. It’s just that there are things I sometimes think about … My father’s sister, your aunt, when she decided she didn’t want to be a Lutheran any more, after reading some book or other, entered a convent, and some say she has visions … My father, for two years before he died, hadn’t been able to stand the sight of the colour red. And do you know how he died?’

  ‘My father’s normal!’ Joseph said resolutely.

  ‘Quite possibly. I was talking for the sake of it … Are there always so many boats on the canal?’

  ‘Always. It’s the main harbour of the town.’

  ‘Do you have a lot of friends?’

  ‘I don’t have any!’

  ‘Not even at the university?’

  ‘They don’t like young men whose mothers serve drinks to carters.’

  ‘Why does she do it?’

  ‘Because the local people think of us as foreigners and don’t come into our shop. Without the bargees and the carters …’

  The path was nothing now but a narrow towpath alongside the canal. A small boat glided by, piloted by a poacher on his way to lay traps, who kept an eye on the banks as he sculled.

  ‘Do you have a girlfriend, Cousin Joseph?’

  ‘No.’

  It was an unpleasant, bad-tempered ‘no’.

  ‘Shall we walk back?’

  They again saw the couple not far from the streetlamp. It was as if their lips hadn’t come unstuck since the previous time. Further on, the dried-out barges in the boat-builder’s yard, the carpenter’s family outside the first house, and at last the Krull family, with the wicker armchair, the white beard, the long porcelain pipe and Aunt Maria’s check apron.

  The air was blue, the strands of
fog a lighter blue, everything was blue, the sky, the trees, the blue of night, and so, too, when they went back inside, was the transparent sign for Remy Starch.

  Before opening the door of his room, Hans stopped on the landing. Hearing a noise that sounded like a muffled sob, he shrugged.

  Then, once in bed, he was aware of footsteps below. It was Joseph, going round in circles in his room, with no thought of sleep.

  2.

  Before the event, the terrible discovery on the bank of the canal, there were three more ordinary days and a Sunday. Which is to say that Hans got to know everything, firstly because, even in bed, he heard the slightest scratching and guessed what it was, and secondly because he was everywhere, tirelessly, in the kitchen behind Anna, in the shop when his Aunt Maria was serving a drink to a carter or arguing with Pipi, in Liesbeth’s room, where his cousin no longer dared venture, in the workshop and in Joseph’s room; most often they hadn’t seen him come in and would give a start when they did see him, wondering how long he had been watching them.

  He had discovered that Cornelius was always the first up, and that it had been that way since the early days of his marriage. Perhaps it had been unintentional the first time, but then he had continued. He would go downstairs in his slippers, as noiseless as a mouse gnawing at something, and proceed to the cellar, where he would fill two buckets with coal. Then he would light the fire, as Hans knew from the whiff of petrol that came to him, because Cornelius sprinkled the wood with petrol.

  Then the door of the shop would open; Cornelius would grind the coffee and finally, while waiting for the water to boil, would fill his long pipe.

  At six, he would creep upstairs and place a cup of coffee on his wife’s bedside table.

  Hans also discovered …

  Something he didn’t yet know and that he learned that Sunday! Firstly, that although the shutters of the shop were closed, the door remained half open, and they not only sold groceries, but also served drinks. Secondly, that not everybody went to church, again because of the shop: Aunt Maria and Anna would take turns to stay behind.

  That day, the others caught the tram at the corner of the street. Even just waiting at the stop had a certain solemnity about it. Cornelius in his frock coat, his hands stiff in grey cotton gloves, stared straight ahead. Joseph kept his bored air and had inherited from his mother the habit of tilting his head to one side in a nostalgic or resigned attitude.

  God moves in mysterious ways …

  That was the theme of the sermon that Sunday. By the time they left church, the town was bustling. In the central neighbourhood where they found themselves, the fair was in full swing.

  ‘Have you ever been on a carousel, cousin?’ Hans asked Liesbeth.

  As soon as he looked at her, she felt obliged to blush, and Joseph was no better at sustaining his cousin’s gaze.

  Hans laughed, realizing how strange it was for the Krull family to be making their way through the crowd attending the fair. Not only had they just come out of a Protestant church rather than a Catholic one, not only did Uncle Cornelius barely speak French, but everything about them, even Joseph’s resigned smile, was alien to the things that surrounded them.

  Instead of catching the tram at the stop where they had got off, they went, by tradition, to the following stop and, again traditionally, dropped by a pastry shop to buy a cake, which Liesbeth carried by the string.

  Poor Liesbeth! She could no longer bear to have people looking at her and was really worked up about the insignificant event that had marked her flesh! The strange thing was that she was more upset by the fact that Hans had looked at her body, piece by piece so to speak, than by what he had done! And even now she would occasionally lift her hand instinctively to her chest, as if to make sure that her little pear-shaped breasts were not bare!

  ‘God moves in mysterious ways,’ Joseph told his mother, who liked to know the theme of the sermon.

  Monsieur Schoof came at three, with Marguerite. Although Hans hadn’t met them before, he was familiar with every detail of their lives. Monsieur Schoof was the family’s only friend. Another German, who had come to France at about the same time as Krull and had become naturalized, he had opened a shop in Rue Saint-Léonard that sold butter and cheese.

  He was small and round and pink, with eyes of forget-me-not blue and lips like a baby sucking at a bottle, and Marguerite was no less fresh, her plump body reminiscent of something edible.

  She wasn’t Joseph’s fiancée, strictly speaking, but as good as: it had long ago been decided that they would marry.

  Anna demonstrated a new crochet stitch; Marguerite blushed several times, whenever Hans’ eyes readily came to rest on her blouse, which was full to bursting. What else did they do? Nothing. Cornelius said not a word. He sat there in his wicker armchair, as if posing for a family portrait, and only occasionally took his pipe out of his mouth with a hieratic gesture to mutter a few syllables to his friend Schoof.

  Schoof was blissfully happy. They were both happy, out there on the pavement, looking at the canal, watching the tram passing from time to time, a family in their Sunday best paying a visit. The aroma of freshly prepared chocolate wafted from the carpenter’s next door, where Sunday had much the same rhythm, and Hans would occasionally look at Joseph’s hands, predicting the moment when they would tense in a spasm, as if his cousin suddenly felt dizzy.

  ‘Shall we go upstairs for a while?’ he whispered to Liesbeth, who was sitting quietly on her chair.

  It would have been amusing, in this calm, with the window open and the family in a circle on the pavement, but Liesbeth recoiled as if someone had blasphemed in front of her.

  How about with Anna? Unfortunately, she already had her mother’s tough, solid appearance, and Hans had noticed that she wore a belt that made her look as hard as an old sideboard.

  Time finally passed, since the table that had been cleared after lunch, laid for afternoon tea and then cleared again, was again covered in tablecloth and plates in anticipation of dinner.

  Only after this last meal did Hans go out to roam about the fair, hatless as usual, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, with that air of being at home everywhere that unsettled Joseph.

  He noticed a young girl he was almost sure he recognized as the one he had seen in the shadows of the quayside, clinging to a man: Sidonie, daughter of the famous Pipi.

  He followed her for a while through the crowd. She was arm in arm with another girl even younger than her. Although she was only sixteen, Sidonie was playing the young lady, or rather the elegant courtesan.

  She must have seen The Lady of the Camellias, and she moved through the fair imagining she was the focus of all eyes, the girl who aroused all men’s desire and all women’s jealousy.

  You sensed it from the way she walked, the way she looked about her, the way she leaned towards her meek companion and confided things in her with a laugh.

  She wasn’t ugly. She might have been thin, with a pale face, but she had finely drawn features and a nicely formed little body squeezed into an exaggeratedly tight suit tailored to emphasize her shapely young figure.

  Hans almost … But no! He shrugged. He wasn’t up to taking her and her friend to all the fairground booths before drawing her – perhaps! – into some dark corner.

  He suddenly did an about-turn on seeing his cousin Joseph strolling amid the crowd, just like him, except that Joseph looked tense, staring straight ahead as if he were doing something very serious or very difficult.

  Hans amused himself for a while, watching Joseph from a distance, and he was very pleased when he saw the tall, stern young man awkwardly following on the heels of Sidonie.

  ‘I bet his fingers are shaking!’ he thought.

  The Schoofs had long since gone home. The Krulls were asleep. Hans had a glass of beer on a café terrace, looked around for his cousin and went home to bed. A slight noise in the next room told him that Liesbeth wasn’t asleep, but he didn’t feel up to joining he
r, especially as she would cry, and he would have to talk.

  The noise of coal being shovelled in the cellar, then, quite a while later, the coffee grinder. Hans got out of bed, for no reason, and went downstairs in his pyjamas, perhaps with the idea of seeing his uncle at close quarters.

  It was raining lightly and steadily, bringing out the greenery on the quayside, although it wouldn’t last. Millions of moving circles appeared and disappeared on the smooth face of the canal. Workers were passing on their bicycles.

  ‘Good morning, uncle!’

  Uncle Cornelius looked at him curiously, not yet used to this young man, let alone to the idea that someone could go out to take the air in his pyjamas. But he didn’t say anything. He never said anything. Perhaps he was a halfwit, perhaps a philosopher quietly living his own life, protected by an invisible shell.

  Just opposite the house, a motor barge, large and brown with a rounded bow, was getting ready to leave. On deck, the bargee’s wife was pushing on her pole to move the boat away from the canal bank while below, her husband was trying to start the diesel engine, from which a few puffs could occasionally be heard.

  The engine wouldn’t start. The lock gate was open. Other barges were waiting behind that one. The woman leaned into the hatch and said something to her husband in Flemish.

  Despite the rain, Hans crossed the road, still in slippers and pyjamas, his body at ease, his movements free, his first cigarette of the day between his lips.

  For a moment, his attention shifted to a group of soldiers just entering the firing range on the other side of the canal. Then he tried to make out what the man and the woman were saying in Flemish.

  Turning, he could see the Krull house, the Krull shop and his uncle in the doorway, with his long, very German pipe.

  Suddenly, eddies stirred the water, and thick smoke spurted from the exhaust pipe. The bargee came out on to the deck and ran to the helm.

  ‘Hey, you!’ Hans called to him.

  The man turned and leaned over to see what the young man was pointing at in the water.

  Hans had no idea what it was either: something white in the eddies, like a thick piece of linen. The nose of the barge was already advancing between the dripping walls of the lock. The bargee leaned further over, looking straight ahead because of the manoeuvre, then suddenly let out a cry and began gesticulating.